Meet Paul Blick: born in France (but not Paris), son of a car dealer, provincial sociology student-cum-theoretical revolutionary, briefly employed (by his father-in-law), married and soon to discover adultery and other satisfactions of a desperate househusband as consort of a high-flying wife who conquers the world as CEO of a Jacuzzi-manufacturing company. This not-so-extraordinary Frenchman is delivered to the not-so-extraordinary awareness of having arrived in middle age more a product of his times, his country, and blind chance than a creature of his own free will. Jean-Paul Dubois gives us a man whose life reflects the story - the mind and the heart - of a society coming belatedly, poignantly, and often hilariously to grips with the abiding pain and intermittent beauty of what living has become.