In Los Angeles, Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control, spending his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he's recklessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous with the help of a loyal foot soldier—a porn-loving midget he met in jail. Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships, and two of her coworkers at the statistics company—an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blonde bombshell—become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer. Then a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes's suicidal editor. Told from five points of view, this novel takes place over the three wild days in which these lives intersect.