Being There

The Story

Chauncey Gardiner is the great enigma:  a hero of the American media.  TV loves him; print pursues him.  He is a household face.  He is the one everybody is talking about, though nobody knows what HE is talking about.  No one knows where he has come from, but everybody knows he has come to money, power and sex.  Was he led to all this by the lovely, well-connected wife of a dying Wall Street tycoon?  Or is Chauncey Gardiner riding the waves all by himself because, like a TV image, he floated into the world buoyed up by a force he did not see and could not name?  Does he know something we don't?  Will he fail?  Will he ever be unhappy?  The reader must decide.