This richly ironic comedy is a nimble juggle of shifting realities, where the briefest collisions of experience shape the lives of a middle-aged writer and his son. . At the age of twenty-two, Joel Zwilling is emerging as a literary wunderkind. He has published a successful first novel, and his story about a widowed writer is about to be featured in a leading magazine. Yet just before the piece appears, Joels real wife and daughter are killed in a car accident. He is left with a young son to raise and a resulting writers block as large and unmoving as a pyramid. Over the next two decades, Joels career will be all but eclipsed by that of his son, Nate, whose own youthful writing success has given him the confidence to hope for big things. Thus Nate is astounded--and jealous--when his father is approached by a slick director who wants to capture his tragic early work on film. As the filmmaker and his sensual assistant bedevil father and son, the retributions rain down upon both sides. In a finely-tuned symphony of the wry as well as the heartbreaking, Ross Feld explores the surprising ways in which our lives can be sculpted, not by the people we hold most dear, but by an invariable troupe of unlikely others.