Mark Sperling is a senior at Princeton, a youth of great promise. World War II breaks out. He enlists in the Army Air Corps, becomes a pilot, and is sent to India to fly supplies to China over the Himalayan "Hump." His plane crashes. Two crewmen are killed and he is seriously injured, losing a foot. Discharged from the service, he returns home a bitter, broken man, weighed down by shame and guilt. He becomes a drunk and a womanizer, disgusting the townspeople, and accumulating as many enemies as lovers. Redemption begins when Sperling meets the right woman. But when his betrothed becomes secretive about her past, his depression returns. He seeks solace in his lifelong passion for opera. At a matinee performance of Don Giovanni at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, one bleak December Saturday, his checkered past and his tormented present come together in a surprising ending. The novel is set in the northwestern New Jersey and the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania.