At forty-eight, Bart Darling is about to perform a movie stunt that will in all likelihood kill him. Lorraine, his hillbilly girlfriend who is carrying his child, gives him an ultimatum: call it off or she'll split. Bart summons his emotionally distant, twenty-nine-year-old son Marcel from New York to help him hold on to Lorraine. But Marcel finds himself falling for Lorraine, even as he sorts out his ambiguous feelings for Bart. Shaped in a prose of beautiful clarity and simplicity. . . . Humor leavened with compassion; untidy, constantly surprising life; loss and remembrance--all play a part in Nichols's exhilarating music. At forty-eight, Bart Darling, actor, stuntman, poet, and constant womanizer, is about to perform a stunt for a grade-B movie that will in all likelihood kill him. John Nichols is the author of On Top of Spoon Mountain, The Wizard of Loneliness, A Ghost in the Music, If Mountains Die, The Milagro Beanfield War , and other works. He lives in Taos, New Mexico.