Scores of characters—some famous, some fictional, and most real—populate Hannah's short novel. Many are childhood friends, relatives, or Hollywood acquaintances. Narrating his novel in the first person, Hannah starkly presents his characters as good or bad—as a "great villain" or "a golden man"—but does virtually nothing to explain why they merit such labels.

Beside Hannah himself, the central character is Barton Benton Yelvertson, a sixty- two-year-old man, whom Hannah had imagined from the time he was fifteen, but did not meet until some thirty years later. For Hannah, Yelvertson communicates the wisdom and truth of one generation to another.

Tall, handsome, rich, and manly, Yelvertson almost seems a projection of what Hannah would like to imagine himself in fifteen or twenty years.

When drug dealers kill Yelvertson's son and badly wound his daughter-in-law, Yelvertson's life is changed.

His ex-wife leaves...