Soon turning fifty, Jerry Deaver's life of stability comes crashing down. Having left his wife more than two years before without apparent reasons, Jerry returned home to assist his dying wife and to look after two twenty something children. Following her death, he tries to rebuild his life with his adult children, Richard and Lauren, both in graduate studies. However, his son bears an insoluble resentment for his father's leaving in the first place, while the daughter becomes amenable to rebuild. However, things fall apart when two pornographic tapes discovered by his children reveal his orientation. Jerry is, and has always been, gay.
Not by choice is he launched into an alien space, liminal and foreboding. Desperately, he reconnects with old secret friends and makes new ones, desperately tries to realign with his children, invades the party scene, joins a gym, gets involved with shady characters, experiments sexually, challenges his superiors at work, discovers an intellectual mentor, renews lost, close friendships, reorganizes himself with his extended family and reinvents himself in the possibility of a new significant other—all in the course of the summer of 1996. When the floor of familiarity gave way, he just keeps falling until he grabs hold of a future.
While the summer of 1996 is a re-education for Jerry, he almost fails the course. The idea of re-education demands that that the protagonist realign his whole world and consciousness with his new commitment to a profound honesty coming from the pretense of 49 years. Education is interior; he must relearn how to be.