John Updike's 21st novel describes the life, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education at M.I.T. and his successful business take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskells Crossing, in eastern Massachusetts, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life journey, the communal humanity of villages, chiefly embodied in their female citizens, seeks to humanize him, assuaging and chastening his childhood sense of singularity and foreboding. He knows that the quotidian surface holds an abyss of calamity beneath it, but he strives to cling to his dreamlike sense of leading a charmed life, an attempt in which he is encouraged by his two wives, Phyllis and Julia, and a number of other women.