The gates

Primo Thomas, a teacher of English to new immigrants, faces the second half of his life. His parents, a black physician and his Italian-American wife, both from Harlem, died when he was a young man; his marriage has recently ended; hardly anything remains of the Lower East Side neighborhood in which he came of age. He has always drawn a sense of himself from the people gathered around him - now the mirror of the changing, hallucinatory world refuses to reflect his image back.