What deter­mines the path we take in life? Is it a genet­ic pre­dis­po­si­tion, the twists and turns of fate, the peo­ple we meet along the way? In Respon­si­ble Men, his first nov­el, Edward Schwarz­schild exam­ines these issues as he limns the path his cen­tral char­ac­ter, Max Wolin­sky, has tak­en in the past and the choic­es he will make in the present, now that he has returned to Philadel­phia, the family’s home­town, for his son’s bar mitz­vah. Max’s moth­er died when he was a young boy and he was raised by his father and uncle Abe, both glib trav­el­ing sales­men. The imper­ma­nence and shifti­ness that stem from this type of career rubbed off on young Max. In any case, Max had lit­tle patience for col­lege or work­ing for oth­ers. He always had a scheme, but most of them didn’t suc­ceed for long. Now he has returned, broke, from Flori­da, where he had fled after his painful divorce, and real­izes that his father and stroke-rid­den uncle need him to sup­port them. In order to find the mon­ey, he could pull off a pho­ny real-estate scheme that would net him $25,000 at the expense of a well-fixed senior cou­ple, but at the same time Max wants to turn a cor­ner, become a law-abid­ing cit­i­zen for his new girl­friend and an upright father to his teenage son. An insight­ful, well told tale about the intri­ca­cies of human nature.