This shattering account of Dan Tiamat’s doom-haunted rise from poverty to international renown as a newspaper columnist is the story of a man who, by rights, should always have been a “coffee-runner for some floating crap game.”  Instead, in an almost religious worship of fame and success, he creates a meaningless world of his own that cheats him of the significance her longer for, breaks him physically and spiritually, and at last destroys him.

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Despised, feared, loved or pitied, Dan Tiamat becomes the intimate of 
politicians, the confidant of gangsters and actresses – never able to forget his threadbare youth or believe he really deserves the adulation and vast salary he receives. Movies are made from his columns. A Broadway musical is based on one of his stories. And his thousands of friends confuse him as much as his thousands of enemies.

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In his early hunger for celebrity lies the key to his inescapable fate. Unfaithful to a devoted wife – and unfaithful extravagantly, as in everything he does – he is forced by his outraged father-in-law, manager of the paper, into writing a column of advice to the lovelorn.

 

Humiliated and furious, Dan’s first blistering letters as “Miss Friendship” advise his lonely correspondents to face the perverse truths of his own twisted world. He writes with a kind of hysterical joy, not realizing that each letter must ultimately boomerang, bringing destruction back to its source with deadly accuracy.

 

In an awesome climax, Dan is finally the lone symbol of all mankind, blasphemously cursing the existence it has created for itself.