The Serial

[1] Beginning in 1976, the book's chapters had been serialized in the Marin County alternative weekly newspaper Pacific Sun, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle.

The plot revolves around Harvey and Kate Holroyd, a couple in the midst of the mid-1970s Marin County lifestyle who are undergoing marital problems, with many other characters introduced in the book.

Many things associated with the human potential movement are mentioned and satirized, including est, the Fischer-Hoffman Process, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull; radical feminism and Sierra Club membership are seemingly ubiquitous; and kids are sent to free-form summer camps offering survival training and "spontaneous rap sessions".

The book satirizes many of the elements of a particular mid-to-late 1970s subculture, also described to some degree by author Tom Wolfe in his 1976 non-fiction essay "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening", particularly as manifested in the lives of people then between the ages of about 30 and 45 in affluent parts of California.

It is a Baedeker guide to a desolate region, the monochromatic inner landscape of persons whose life is consumption, of goods and salvations, and whose moral makeup is the curious modern combination of hedonism and earnestness.