Leonard Schiller, an Upper West Side writer of some repute and a relic of The New York Intellectual scene, is courted in the twilight of his life by Heather, a young, ambitious, graduate student from Brown who wants to writer her master's thesis on Schiller's novels. Meanwhile, Schiller's daughter, Ariel, an aerobics instructor,who Heather views as "another boring forty-year-old obsessed with her biological clock," is looking for love and a father for a much-longed-for child. In this finely tuned serious novel, the lives of these disparate people converge.