Synopsis
Louisa Rutledge, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Harvard professor, picks up a stranger on Boston Common and, after a crude coupling in her apartment, throws herself out of her window. She survives and returns to the home of her parents in Cambridge, Mass. – her father a rich, east-coast patrician, descended from a signatory of the Declaration of Independence; her mother the alcoholic mistress of a powerful senator.After this preamble, the novel tells the story of the Rutledge family – how Louisa’s parents were drawn into Democratic politics with Henry, her father, the political theorist of the party’s liberal wing. But Henry’s ideals are compromised by the corrupt wheeling-and-dealing of his wife’s lover, Senator Laughlin; and at the same time his progressive views are outflanked by the radicalism unleashed by opposition to the war in Vietnam. It is 1968 and, with no clear principles beyond her parents’ fashionable but now discredited liberalism, Louisa plunges into the political and sexual maelstrom of the times.(
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