What strange impulse feeds the friendship between a teenager—a good student, the son parents with no connection to eccentricity, indifferent to his literary aspirations—with a man of no fixed abode who throws money of dubious origins about and introduces him into a world of completely new, risky, ever sordid experiences? Bonds of ambiguous friendship develop between a kid looking for danger, impatient to enter terrains he has only ever read about, and the indecipherable character of a man marked by a life that seems marginal; bonds of manipulations and fascination that will survive their shared adventure. "What his parents would have called bad habits had been what formed him, and if that education had taken forms considered aberrant by society, it can only be judged by its results."