Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside by younger producers, directors, writers, reviewers, actors, and even their own families, the two friends must confront both their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is really just a business powered by money and celebrity.

Spear, fading in the Malibu hills, is consoled and diverted by his granddaughter, Jennifer Abarbanel, a San Francisco lawyer. Keneret, given one more chance to make a film by his mercurial millionaire backer, centers it around Leet de Loor, a young Frenchwoman he's discovered in Fiji. As the two brilliant veterans slide toward oblivion, the equally brilliant young women rise in the paradisal new world of the Pacific Rim, even as it trembles with terrestrial and human faults.

Richard Stern was born in 1928 in New York City and published his first novel, Golk, in 1960. Among his twenty books are In Any Case, which won the Friends of Literature Prize; Natural Shocks, winner of the Sandburg Prize for Novel of the Year; Noble Rot: Stories 1949-1988, named the Sun-Times Book of the Year; Stitch; Other Men's Daughters; and A Sistermony, which was awarded the Heartland Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year. In 1985 he won the Medal of Merit for the Novel given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Stern is Regenstein Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.