Vincent is the youngest child in an Italian-American family living in California's San Joaquin Valley. With a World War II veteran-businessman father whose conception of a logical, ordered world is both oppressive and reassuring, and a mother whose never-discussed mental illness and recurrent breakdowns crash through the family like waves, Vincent is a boy whose desire for understanding is particularly acute.
But as he moves farther out into the world - to the Midwest, Seattle, Manhattan - he finds it hardly more comprehensible than his own family. And even that which seemed most stable - the landscape of his once-agricultural hometown - is transformed with disorienting rapidity.
