Leroy Upton, the "straight white male" who is the novel’s central character, has come a long way from the sun-baked working-class neighborhood in Bakersfield where he grew up. The son of an oil-field laborer, Leroy is now a professor at a small college in Northern California. He is happily married, has three much-loved children, and close friends who share his memories and success.But life is about to deliver a series of challenges that overturn Leroy’s hard-won serenity and threaten to destroy his marriage and his family. Leroy’s father, Earl, once so wise and invincible, is descending into the empty, helpless depths of senility, while his ill-tempered mother struggles with her own health problems. The marriage of a high school friend ends tragically. And Leroy wrestles with his own bitter secret—his fierce resentment of his beloved wife’s troubled past and of the other men who knew her before he married her.