The novel is a fictionalized version of the life of the New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and is partly set in Slaughter, Louisiana.

Both these historical figures are portrayed in ways that draw on their actual lives, but which depart from the facts in order to explore the novel's central theme – the relationship between creativity and self-destruction.

The novel draws on the style of jazz, being structured in a fragmented, and "syncopated" form, with episodes extending in elongated "riffs" before suddenly lurching unpredictably into an apparently unrelated scene.

Bolden's manic, extroverted but self-harming behavior is set against the introverted figure of Bellocq, who expresses his own frustrated desires in his intimate erotic photographs, but then compulsively violates them with scratches.

[1] This production received a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for Best Original Play, General Theatre in 1990.