When Jasper Whiting, a successful plastic surgeon, leaves his family to live alone in a run-down block of houses in Boston's North End, he does not imagine how his life and what he has lived for will be transformed by his relations with the people he meets in that unpromising setting: by the bizarrely beautiful, strangely wise one-legged model, Luigi Sasekawa; by the quadraplegic boy upstairs, who inspires devotion in the people who help to take care of him; and most of all by Rhoda, a remarkable woman, teacher of the handicapped and later the director of a guerrilla opera for and about them, whom Jasper comes to love. And when the physically handicapped of the city begin to band together under a charismatic leader who means to make a revolution with these "wretched of the earth," Jasper too is forced to declare himself in his actions, as nothing in his past life has brought him to do. Don Bloch's fifth novel–solidly contemporary in its spirit and in its setting of urban violence, but strangely visionary in its theme–is at once comic, troubling, and passionate. Like Jasper Whiting, its readers may be first taken aback and then compelled by this adventurous fiction.