Bawdy, earthy, chuckling, this book is like being approached by a trench-coated stranger who, grinning widely, whips open his coat to reveal...a 3-piece suit. After you recover from your flinch and start to smile, he, still grinning, rips away the side snaps of his pants to flash you, for reals. Depending on who you are, you either retreat in disgust or burst out laughing and clap him on the back, joining him in the nearby bar for stories. Slightly long-winded stories, but sprinkled with humor and full of questions, a few realizations.

Nub is slowly losing zest for life in Boston with his frigid, too-familiar wife Pamela and a curatorial job. He holds the belief that society is disintegrating the values of the past and, and, er, it's bad (I've forgotten how it's phrased, exactly). In Little Rock, he has the thought of obtaining some carnal pleasures that have been absent in his marriage and reconnects with his old, racist friend Dall Hawkins; his black, childhood friend Naps; and a former girlfriend and black-haired mystery Margaret. He becomes rivals with a playwright who turns out to have the same beliefs and dismay about society as he does, although they never meet. It's a strange collection of events when I look back at it now, a rambling jumble.

I've come to hold the belief that "home" is made up of people and only incidentally associated with a physical location. Nub Stone returns home to Little Rock to try to figure some things out, and appears to come to the opposite conclusion. Or rather, he had the wrong people in mind? The events were a little wacky, but the love in the descriptions of place were palpable. ( )