Now Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky and it is high time that his life came to something. His days are cluttered with comic absurdities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself a thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in lawsuits; he is held in thrall by the young, sexually beguiling but expensive and unsuitable Renata; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic Mafioso called Rinaldo Cantabile; and his career seems to have ground to a halt.