An ageing American painter living in Paris, known as Scumbler, moves through the city by bicycle, selling paintings, scavenging materials and constructing a life designed to evade ordinary adulthood.

At sixty, however, the arrangement is beginning to fray. His body is slowing, mortality has become harder to treat as someone else’s administrative problem, and the underground spaces he explores beneath Paris begin to resemble the deeper chambers of memory he has spent a lifetime avoiding.

Scumbler is a loose, first-person novel of artistic compulsion, ageing and self-invention. Its narrator digresses through painting, sex, war, family, Catholicism, American expatriate life and the practical mechanics of surviving outside respectable society. Wharton’s style is deliberately raw and associative, closer to a private notebook or spoken monologue than a conventionally engineered plot. Scumbler can be vain, tender, crude and philosophically restless—an artist who has made freedom into both an ethic and a hiding place.

Wharton was himself an American painter living in France, and the novel’s autobiographical pressure is unmistakable. But this is less disguised memoir than a study of the stories by which a person keeps himself intact. Beneath its bohemian comedy sits a more unsettling question: what happens when the identity built to protect you from death becomes another sealed room?

Jonathan Cape, 1984 first UK edition hardcover. Dust jacket rubbed with light edge wear; internally clean and firmly bound.