As a small-town boy in the early twentieth century, Lee Goodell learned about a brutal crime-and the efforts of his father, a judge, to help cover it up. Lee would go on to attend a private boys' school, become a sculptor, become familiar with both Chicago's gritty South Side and its wealthy, intellectual Hyde Park, and get married. But it is his reunion with a girl from his childhood, a victim of a sexual assault she cannot remember, that will spur him to contemplate the event that marked the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his understanding of the world, in this sprawling, powerful novel by one of the most accomplished and admirable American writers.
