In a bawdy, irreverent send-up of the literary scene, this riotous odyssey has blocked writer Eliot Morrison swept from New York with its agents, actresses, and "desperation panic states" to the seedy, one-grand Hotel San Marcos on the California coast, for a week-long writers' conference. While his fellow writers are driven by literary ambitions to savage one another's work and one another, Eliot finds himself at the center of a bizarre turn of events that culminates in senseless and absurd violence.
Laying bare the lives and illusions of professional and would-be writers as well as the hangers-on who inhabit the literary world, this novel is sexy, outrageous, devastating, and satirical. It has a compassion for its characters whose parallel lives, propelled by ambition and disappointment, turn to collide head-on in fulfillment of relentless destiny.
