The contents are a two-page letter of fatherly advice, identifying Senior's main regrets in life as words of warning.

An older relative with a print shop prepares, without asking, a hundred copies, causing Junior some small embarrassment at school.

Like Senior, McElroy's father was a scholarship student to Harvard, majored in chemistry, played lacrosse, was rejected by the army, became a stockbroker, raised his family in Brooklyn Heights, and died when his only child, named for him, was 15.

More germane to the development of the novel itself, one finds a parallel to Junior's relationship with his late father extending beyond mere grief.

"McElroy seems to have released a private mystery into the realm of a universal quest...in the slow beauty of rendered detail, we watch as the boy steps into his early manhood with a new integrity of spirit....[It] may be his most accessible and easiest to read [novel], though no less elegant .... Really, really try it.