Ewald, the narrator of this picaresque tale, is deeply concerned with fantasies that shouldn't come true (sex with animals and plants, suicide) - probably because he's the kind of twenty-five-year-old who's so full of appetite that he'll try anything. Along with his two oddball friends, Elvira, an actress, and Broccoli, a self-described genius, Ewald feels permanently on the fringes of a society in which "people with cultivated taste don't talk about money or sex." And yet Ewald and his friends are ambitious enough to want recognition from that society, and their careering course from Amsterdam to America becomes a moving attempt "to live genuinely under unreal circumstances."