Fiction. Friend of Frank O'Hara and "bodyguard" to Willem DeKooning, Turkish expatriate Erje Ayden was the house novelist of the New York School poets and painters during the early and mid-1960s. Ayden boasts of a background in espionage, so this genre-spy thriller could be a veiled autobiographical tale. Carl Halman, posted by East Germany in Manhattan as a "sleeping agent" during the cold war, must develop a cover identity as a writer. Committed to ending injustice, Carl sees his espionage activities as a personal contribution toward maintaining a global balance of power. But in New York, Carl begins to believe in his cover identity: editing a magazine, marrying the wife of the famous novelist Hubert Cleaver (a hilarious a clef portrait of Norman Mailer). He thinks that he can live this way forever... until suddenly, he's called. Writing after the book's first self-publication, O'Hara hails Ayden as pop art's answer to Camus. "Ayden," writes O'Hara, "is an alien wherever he goes, probing and disfiguring ordinary reality."