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Frank Teeman is, in many ways, an ordinary young man from Kansas who has finally made it to the Big Apple to pursue his dream of painting. He lives a modest life, working at McGarrety's, a local supermarket, sometimes dating women and occasionally going to parties with Jacsun Pranesh, his cab-driving buddy. Frank has no idea his life is to drastically change forever the day a certain wealthy Mrs. Irene Solomon walks into the grocery store while the protagonist is working, notices a rather shoddy little painting he has hanging in the shop, and insists on buying it from the young artist. Before long, the wealthy, elderly Irene is opening up her own art shop, Solomon's, and taking Frank under her wings. She has also convinced him to show and offer for auction his paintings as her very first featured artist.
Interestingly, Frank's story is told via a quasi-diary format, providing only a date as each chapter heading. But because those dates range seemingly randomly from the 1960s through the 1990s, a disjointed effect is achieved through the narration of the fictionalized memoir. This and other setting and stylistic choices like it add successfully to a relatively bizarre and, at times, dreamy quality of the book's narrative. Fans of surrealism and the absurd will no doubt have much here to enjoy. There is a lot going on at any given moment, including an abundance of inner dialogue in the form of philosophical ponderings. This experiential novel flirts with issues of fame and happiness, money, lust versus love, the illusory satisfaction of drugs and high-society parties, and what it means to be truly alive in a postmodern New York City so often preoccupied with bright flashes of light rather than lasting, organic substance.