Dr. Morris Weisberg is a distinguished sixty-year-old pathologist as well as an amateur violinist and classical music lover. The quixotic and troubled doctor discovers a disastrous instance of malpractice and a cover-up reaching to the office of the Director of his California hospital. During this year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eichmann’s execution, and above-ground nuclear testing, Doctor Weisberg struggles to find a way to confront his own crisis.

Morris and his wife, Sandra, were born in Europe near the start of the twentieth century, and each was brought to America at an early age. In 1962, the couple is living in suburbia, in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They have two sons. Both are aspiring artists in their twenties, and one is straight, the other gay. As they test limits and act out their resentments, the household begins to fill with excesses, revelations, and rebellion.

At work and at home, communication fails, brutal buried truths erupt, and Morris begins to descend into maddening depression. He seeks refuge in his love of classical music and in his California garden. His glassed-in lanai there offers him solace, a place – like Los Angeles itself – of pleasure and escape, which ends up being a haunted, alienated space. As Morris plummets, his struggle to keep affirming his faith in both science and music wavers. Dr. Weisberg becomes a powerfully moving, larger-than-life character – noble, destructive, and terrifying.