I. The hero is born into an unhappy family; he has
nightmares but loves the girl next door; a dog kills his pet duck; he
is left alone on the big river, where a man had drowned; he frequents
the upholstery repair shop of his grandpa Bill, the home of Bill and
Gram, and the great house on the river; he falls into a trance in his
father’s room beside the river; he learns to fish and to kill his
catch; an evil aunt ruins his sister Tari’s playhouse; he loves little
girls too much and too often; he has a vision while fishing for
crawdads in the San Lorenzo River; he and his brother Seth learn of
their father’s death, smothered in a pyramid of sand.
II. Now ten years old, he takes up entomology; his
disturbed mother’s pet pigeon is crushed in a door; he learns the
truth about his philandering father; in high school he has a new
friend in Frankie Lee; he murders prairie dogs with his father’s gun;
he meets the mysterious Johnny Martin, a poet, in love with the hero;
he faints in class while presenting the story of Leopold and Loeb.
III. He wins a prize and meets Eisenhower; he
works as forest firefighter and sees a man burn to death; Johnny
Martin shows him around Berkeley.
IV. At Berkeley he suffers from herpes simplex and meets
strange characters; a Los Angelino seduces him; Frankie Lee joins him
a sordid apartment; he falls in love and travels to Mexico, where he
loses his way; he goes to Harvard but doesn’t like it and flees to
Europe, hoping to marry the girl he loves, who is studying in Spain.
V. When the girl rejects him, he takes a boat from
Barcelona to Athens, where he lives near a whorehouse in Piraeus; he
sells his blood to survive; he climbs Mount Olympus in a snow storm;
he hitchhikes across Algeria just after the war of independence; he
takes drugs in Tangiers.
VI. Back in Berkeley, he finds Frankie Lee and visits old
friends, including Johnny Martin; he has night visions; he meets Isis;
he locates his brother, who has gone mad; he consorts with drug
dealers and enjoys their products; the streets are alive with
revolution; he insults his professors and he meets a woman who claims
to be from another planet; he lives with hippies, some of them mad; he
meets a strange man in a bourgeois house; he has a shattering vision
in which he turns into light and briefly leaves the world.
VII. With Isis he moves to the mountains in Arizona, where
he raises a family; he corresponds with Frankie Lee, living in LA; he
eats peyote and remembers the day his father died; he climbs in the
wilderness and converses about his early youth; he travels in remote
areas; with friends he climbs a volcano in the night and slipping on a
glacier almost dies; he returns to his hometown to find his
grandmother incapacitated, abused, and near death; his grandfather
recalls his brother’s madness; he undergoes a minor operation, after
which he suspects Isis of infidelity.
IX. Ramses and Isis travel to Egypt, where they run up
against Egyptian bureaucracy and attendant horrors; a Copt cheats them
and takes their money; their hopes to see the mummies of the pharaohs
come to naught.
XI. Ramses learns of his brother-in-law’s suicide, shot
through the heart; going to NYC to investigate, he learns that his
sister Tari was with another man that night; living in Greece with his
teenage son, Ramses visits Ithaca, where they search for the house of
Odysseus; back in the states, Ramses learns of his brother’s
whereabouts, missing for forty years; he visits him in a halfway
house, a house of horror.
XIII. Ramses feels intense pains in his abdomen and goes to
the emergency room, where his colon bursts; they operate, but after
terrible suffering he dies, remembering the vision of light he saw in
his youth.
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A Novel