A struggling biographer finds his professional and personal boundaries tested when he is hired to document the life of a cantankerous, elitist novelist. Gordon Scott-Thompson accepts the commission to write the biography of Jimmie Fane, only to discover that Fane’s rigid social prejudices and specific personal aversions create an immediate, volatile friction between them. The narrative follows the escalating conflict as Fane’s disdain for Scott-Thompson’s appearance and linguistic habits clashes with the biographer's own stubbornness. Complicating the professional arrangement further, Fane’s wife, Joanna, introduces a layer of domestic instability that threatens to derail the project entirely.

This work is often characterized as a quintessential example of the author's late-career satirical style, focusing on the minutiae of social friction. The narrative relies on the interplay between the protagonist's lack of pretension and the subject's extreme snobbery to drive its comedic momentum. Readers typically note the precision with which the author dissects the absurdity of literary posturing and the petty conflicts that arise in professional relationships. The text functions as a commentary on the inherent tensions found in the act of biography, where the subject and the writer are forced into an uncomfortable proximity.