It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley,...

It all starts with a noisy toilet. Benny Cooperman's janitor, Kogan, is preoccupied with the demise of his elderly girlfriend, Lizzy Oldridge, who appears to have starved to death. Cooperman agrees to attend the inquest if Kogan will look into the plumbing.   Lizzy may have died hungry, but she had plenty of money, and somehow the former alderman and mayoral candidate Thurleigh Ramsden, an unsavory character if there ever was one, has gained control...

Israel David Goodkind is a minor bureaucrat in the Nixon White House, killing time in the office by writing the story of four generations of his large, sprawling Russian-Jewish immigrant family. As he recounts his brief stint in show business, his torrid affair with a showgirl, and his encounters with a hassled and distracted President Nixon, Goodkind also witnesses historical events firsthand-the Watergate scandal, the Yom Kippur War-and eventually...

Moses E. Herzog suffers from the breakup of his second marriage, the general failure of his life, and the specter of growing up Jewish in the middle of the 20th century. He responds to his personal crisis by writing a series of letters never to be sent, examining his life and times and asking "the piercing questions".

Gold accepts a government post in Washington, considers leaving his wife, and all the while he is also searching for material to write his book on the Jewish experience in America, without realizing he is going through that experience.