Karabekian is a failed abstract expressionist painter (he used a paint that peeled from the canvas mere years after it dried) who yet became a wealthy man through selling pictures his celebrated colleagues gave him to repay debts. His rise to fortune despite his failure is just one of the excruciating Vonnegutian ironies that stud the story. Karabekian recounts both a bemusingly adventurous life crowded with contradictory characters and the events of the summer of 1987 during which he writes.