Somewhere between the Bay of Pigs and Watergate, James Franklin "Dru" Jones IV returns to his prestigeous boarding school for his senior year sardonically aware that his future holds only two potential nuclear holocaust or graduate school. Before Thanksgiving his world is turned askew by the death of his mother and over the ensuing months everything he thought was real and permament is undermined. Abandoned and at times betrayed, he finds himself cut adrift fro the anchors of his life and forced to become a man, perhaps before his time.