At the novel's center, the Geblers:. Dolly, patron of the arts, Midwestern heiress to a great pharmaceutical fortune, raised among her father's Flemish Masters and abstract expressionists. She is dedicated to the idea that art can change the world.

Alfred, her husband, a poor boy from Brooklyn, a good Joe (he thinks), a man with the soul of a seventeen-year-old (she thinks), who feels he should have been a jazz musician, who loves nightclubs and tequila, who believes he has married a woman with no concept of companionship, a woman for whom everything is appearances - black-tie galas and special viewings six nights a week, AIDS benefits, board meetings.

Together (with her money) they are the Aurora Foundation - a renovated parochial school turned into forty thousand square feet of metal and glass tile amidst a burnt-out flatland of Lower East Side tenements. Its purpose: to choose a few men and women of genius, bank them for life, and give them enough rope to hang the world.

Into their high orbit comes Isaac Hooker, twenty-five years old, a wunderkind from New Hampshire, a wild soul, Harvard-educated, but with no direction, no plans. Isaac is new to the big city of New York, working at odd jobs, sleeping in building lobbies, on park benches, on friends' sofas and floors. In an art class at a men's shelter, he discovers a whole new part of himself: the need - the necessity - to paint.

Isaac stumbles into a job at Aurora, quickly becoming Alfred's Fresh-Air Kid - and, more slowly, more crucially and profoundly, becoming Dolly's genius for whom she wants to make everything possible.

As Isaac's vision takes shape, as Dolly's love for him - and her need to be a part of his creation - grows, as Alfred's desperation to feel alive spirals out of control, and as Isaac's painting gains recognition, he is drawn into intellectual and social excitements, the comforts, the amenities - the emotional vortex - of the Geblers' lives, until the luxuriance, the excess of things, of personalities, of feelings, of action, begins to threaten what is most important and most dear to him.