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Dean Decetes, a pornographer with messianic delusions, spins out of control in Los Angelese, where he spends his time drinking himself into a stupor, getting beaten up by strangers he's reckessly insulted, stealing credit cards to pay for sex, being arrested, begging favors, and mounting a PR campaign to make himself famous, with the help of a "loyal footsolider"--a porn-loving midget he met in jail.
Meanwhile his pious, romantic spinster sister, who reluctantly keeps house for him, busies herself writing quasi-religious love notes to the boss she worships at the statistics company where she works, and her co-workers—an obsessive-compulsive Christian Scientist in a twisted marriage and a promiscuous, depressed blond bomb-shell—become enmeshed in her life as she dreams of ridding herself of her freeloading brother and being carried away on a white horse by her employer.
Next door, a teenage math genius runs away from home after her mother humiliates her in school and hooks up at a bar with Decetes's suicidal editor.
The story is told from five points of view—those of Decetes, his sister, the lonely blonde, the Christian scientist & the high school math genius—over three days which the five lives collide as they all mount blundering searches for love and meaning.
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