Richard Elster, 73 years of age, intelligent, and an avid outdoorsman, is called into a war government meeting. Practically with no idea of what is going on, he learns that what happened is top secret and cannot be completely shared with anyone else, even the reader. Overall, however, the job of Elster was to come up with a rock solid plan for launching and maintaining wars.
After that is over with, Elster lives in the desert—the middle of nowhere. However, Jim Finley is a man on a mission, and wants to make a film out of Elster living in the middle of nowhere. Elster reluctantly agrees—as if he had a choice to begin with.
The film isn't mentioned much more throughout the novel after Jessie comes into the scene. Jessie is Elster's daughter; he loves her very much and tells Jim how very intelligent she is. In fact, she can read lips, knowing what someone is about to say before they actually say it.
The novel is confusingly structured in the form of a haiku, the lines describing what happens in the novel. Elster thinks that the government wants him to make a haiku to describe war, but he thinks this is impossible to do. A haiku, confined to only a short amount of syllables, simply would not be enough to chronicle all of the negative effects that war has on people.
The novel received positive reviews, but many readers do not completely understand its structure. As a whole, the novel is surrounded by a cloud of mystery, and many readers wonder if the secretive nature of Elster's character is the portrayal of a real man, and perhaps this is a government conspiracy. No evidence backs any of these claims.
