After a several days' drive from New Mexico, a well-known writer, Larry Morgan and his wife Sally arrive at Battell Pond, to join their friends Sid Lang, a university professor of literature, and his wife Charity, who is about to die of cancer. Once settled in, Larry recalls the history of the friendship between the two couples. As the pages advance, we contemplate the amusements, sufferings, jobs, births, illnesses of two families separated only by distance.
The novel shows the highlights of a friendship; the story of the moments that have remained most strongly engraved in Larry Morgan's memory and even some that he has not lived directly, but that he allows himself to imagine because of the deep knowledge he has of his friends. The style is simple, without implying a lack of care in the language. The theme of the novel is love, and more specifically, the love of friendship, which the writer deals with in a strong way. It is not a relationship in which everything flows in a simple way. There are moments in which the relationship is more difficult, others in which there is a clash between the characters of Larry and Charity. But above all there is a great joy and pleasure, a great surprise at the miracle that it is possible for a relationship as deep as the one between them to exist.
This is an exquisite novel, in which the only thing that stands out from the moral point of view is Charity's attitude towards death: it is just one more element in life, which she can handle. She persuades the doctor to promise not to feed her if she becomes unconscious, and she herself throws away the food for a few days in order to speed up her death. Although this attitude provokes arguments between the protagonists, it ends up being another example of the character's humanity.
There are a couple of scenes of sexual content, always in the marital sphere and relatively brief.