Story follows Lenore Beadsman whose father is a babyfood mogul and whose mother (?), grandmother, and great grandmother are all in the same nursing home. Her great-grandmother (also Lenore) goes missing along with several other residents from the nursing home which her father happens to own. She works at a failed publishing house "Frequent and Vigorous" which is basically a money laundering scheme vehicle for her father and has a troubled relationship with the head guy Rick Vigorous. Their relationship mainly consists of his insecure over-love of her and his recapitulation of the abysmal submissions to their firm. This allows for many humorous frame narratives which are frequently interrupted by the root-level story as Rick powers through to get to the end of the story which is prima facie shitty. The comedic climax of this pattern is her trying to break up with him for erstwhile frat boy Wang Dang Lang (whom she met many years prior visiting her older sister in college) but Rick's preemption of the breakup with the most contrived story yet to explain his psychological codependence on her. This unfolds at the location of Ohio's Grand Old Desert which is a manmade desert concocted south of Cleveland to strike the fear of nature back into the midwesterners by the Governor who was fearful of the overly soft times people were enjoying. Hard times create hard men, etc. etc. It's very reminiscent of IJ's Great Concavity insofar as it is an overtly comedic manmade wasteland.

The characters are so full and delightful. Particularly enjoyable was Mr. Bombardini's quest to eat everything. Having failed his weigh in at Weight Watchers, he learns of their (WW's) philosophy of the internal self vs. the external universe. He decides to just become infinite yang, fully subsuming the external universe into himself, beginning with nine steaks, as many eclairs as he can find, the entire bowl of mints at the restaurant where his debauch begins. He produces quips such as

Time does not exist, I ate it.

and

any port in a storm [talking about baby food]

Love the weird Wallacean idiosyncrasies such as "that hits the spot" being autistically articulated as

My spot is under the force of the blow

The final scene with the parakeet appearing as a significant vessel on of God on the evangelical television shows is one of the funniest scenes and sweetest payoffs of uniquely Wallacean merit.

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