The First Man

The novel opens with a man driving home in his car. The man stops at a light and then simply goes blind. He visits an ophthalmologist who can find nothing physically wrong with his eyes. Within hours, the ophthalmologist and the first man's wife are also blind. The first man is then quarantined in an abandoned mental hospital for several weeks where he suffers appalling conditions. He eventually is forced to allow his wife to be gang raped in exchange for food, a decision that he fundamentally rejects but in practice allows.

Of all of the inmates, he appears to be the most troubled by this so-called parasitic behavior. The first man survives the conflagration at the asylum and then returns to the city. He finds his old apartment is now the home of a writer and decides that strictly owning private property is not particularly...