A compelling story of the sex lives of people and invertebrates at the end of America's twentieth century. Staggering across the polluted swamp of what was once Longfellow's forest primeval comes the happy, singing, all-American Slivenowicz family. Evangeline Slivenowicz and her five children - from five different fathers - live together in a tiny trailer by the slightly impure waters of Lake Gitchee Gumee. At nineteen, Maud, the novel's heroine, is obsessed with sex, power, money and how to get every single thing she wants in a way that - although lacking any morality - never involves much violence or four-letter words. On an intellectual diet of one Reader's Digest article a day, the Slivenowicz clan abandon their mosquito-infested pastoral idyll for Los Angeles, seducing a collection of dentists, English lords, retired UPS stockholders and policemen along the way.