The Desk

Kenneth Dewar is an accountant, so successful over the years that he has become a "venture capitalist" or a "financier" with only one client, a secret one at that, the patrician banker, Ellsworth Dodge. Dewar specializes in "reorganizing" high technology firms, to the immense benefit of Dodge and himself.

During the course of his life Dewar had forgotten his wife and daughter. They are there, and they speak to each other and life goes forward - it is just that he has forgotten them. One Sunday afternoon, his wife dies suddenly and unexpectedly while taking a nap, and Kenneth is forced to remember her again. He also is forced to look after himself and the apartment and the laundry, and he starts to remember many things about his life that he had forgotten, just as he had forgotten his family. He even tries to make an accounting of his marriage, to draw up a balance sheet. And he finds out some things that he never knew about his wife and about human accounting. It is a moving story of what business does to women and men, set in Boston, Cambridge, and Waltham along Route 128.