A desperate quest for self-salvation across the American expanse.
His childhood demolished by an absent father and a manic-depressive mother, Ray has known for a long time that life isn't worth living. Only his close band of similarly ruined friends sustains him. But when they scatter to all ends of the U.S., he is again filled with the desperate notion that life is meaningless, cruel, and unusual, and that suicide is the only logical conclusion. Problem is, he doesn't have the nerve to act. Determined to recover the joyful solace of his friends, Ray heads out into the bottomlands of America where the sediment of broken lives settles. Along the way, he observes "the dumb expectations, dumb anger, dumb resilience, and the dumb, unbearable hope" of citizens everywhere across "the enormous bulge of magnificent, deformed American land." Again finding love in the unloved and beauty where least expected, Ray thrives. But at the same time, he is confronted with indifference, self-absorption, sexual deviance, resignation, and failure. What part of cruel existence compels most of us to survive? Will Ray discover it?
