Larry is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. At the start of the novel, he is a retired academic and writer. He is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Both his parents died in a plane crash, and he went from his local college to the University of California at Berkeley to study English. Larry is highly ambitious and industrious, believing hard work to be the most important of all the virtues. Larry nurtures dreams of literary celebrity, believing himself to be in possession of a “gift.” He looks to his new position as a professor in Madison as the first recognition of this gift by the luminaries of high culture. This feeling indicates another aspect of Larry’s ambitions, which form a trajectory from the plainness of his beginnings in Albuquerque, to an imagined seat of culture and sophistication elsewhere. The anxiety and insecurity implicit to these ambitions has major implications for Larry’s relationship with his wife, Sally, his best friends, the Langs, and even his own work. 

Larry’s wife, Sally, is an academic trained in Classics. She is unblinkingly supportive of Larry to the extent that her own presence in the