"A novel"--Cover.

Includes a reading group guide.

"Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who is beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is about to be impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life carefully negotiating her parents' conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father ... As she grows into adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father's fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own separate life---until he hits rock bottom"--Publisher.