After graduating from Simon Straight College in New York in 1971 Peter Keller finds himself on a waitlist for his preferred law school. His dad is the one who really envisions him a lawyer, so while he waits he moves back in. His game plan is to keep his head down and save up money until the next year's admissions reviews. Hopefully he can blow the review board away with his additional year of experience. He lands a job at a garment manufacturer but is soon miserable working.
Peter sets out on a long chain of job changes. From manual labor in a garment factory he moves to a phone soliciting agency. Then he works as a clerk in the post office, a lower position in his dad's branch. Accompanying his frequent unemployment, Peter feels increasingly hopeless. Finally he gives up on the idea of law school altogether. He begins drinking heavily and stops praying, which is a serious blow to his very Jewish father.
Peter has a stepmother who decides to reunite with him for lunch one day. Unable to avoid the meeting with this woman whom he detests, he decides to work up the courage to meet her with a little bump of cocaine. His various older family members start noticing his erratic behavior and demand more face time with him. They're trying to intervene before he falls off the deep end, but it's too late. In a desperate effort to get out of lunches and coffee dates and movies and the like, he starts phoning in anonymous bomb threats to those establishments.
The police trace the calls with ease, landing him in court. Peter pleas guilty and is sentenced to probation as no one actually got hurt and he doesn't possess any explosives. Probation keeps him out of trouble for a while, until he decides to visit his old college haunts. He falls madly in love with a young writer who happens to be the wife of one of his old professors. The man, already jealous of his wife's literary success compared to his failed foray into novelistic writing, becomes incensed at Peter's affair with his wife. The two keep it at it, however.
In a rare glimpse of luck, Peter is hired as an adjunct composition professor for incoming freshmen. He tolerates the job, but his heart isn't in his work. Shiftless and unmotivated, he visits Manhattan one weekend and decides to enter a stand-up showcase. He finds some success in the performance, but immediately returns to his wandering desires. Readers are left to assume that Peter never settles down and chooses a passion.
