Frank Bascombe has everything going for him. He lives while avoiding life, leading an ordinary, almost invisible existence in a subdued landscape of greenery in suburban New Jersey. Frank Bascombe is an exemplary family man and a model citizen, but in truth he is a fugitive. He has been running from life his entire life—from New York, from writing, from obligations, from feelings, from grief, from joy. What drives him is an inexplicable existential fear of life. A pleasant little town drowned in dense foliage of old trees; a respectable sports journalist job; the ringing of church bells; a smart, understanding wife—and all of this unbearably weighs on Frank. Beneath the calm of idyll, something twitches, swelling with inevitability, the explosion that’s coming. Will he go through with it, or will the tension dissolve into the soothing peace of the green lawns around him?