This is Joseph Heller’s first book after CATCH-22, and in it he explores the wartime generation’s new predicament…as husband, progenitor, provider and survivalist. What happened to all the youthful dreams and those who peopled them? Gone to ruin. Because Heller is an architect of his age, his comments on the rubble contain more irony than perhaps he realizes. 

          Bob Slocum is a promising executive and society demands that he should be happy. But his wife is a drunken flirt and his daughter wages her own cunning campaign against him. Slocum’s soliloquy moves to a shocking climax as fate hands him a tragic focus for his despair.