'What are you doing here!'

From the moment the cantankerous narrator Pinpin answers the phone in an empty house in Tampa, Florida, the question asked by his cousin Tom-Tom echoes in his mind.

Having left the Anglo-Saxon gentry of Boston's Louisburg Square and the contentious left-wing intelligentsia of New York's Greenwich Village, Pinpin, a retired novelist, wants nothing more than to be left alone. His wife dead, his books out of print, his sons lost to the seductive wiles of word processors and movie development deals, until finally, at the end of his 'tether', Pinpin goes back to Tampa. But he is quick to assert, 'I am not returning, touching base, none of that... Tampa is where I came from that's all you could say for it.'

As soon as Pinpin sets foot back in his parents house--against his will and better judgement--he finds himself snared in the mire of family politics and demands, with one cousin telling him not to trust another. Not knowing what to think, Pinpin is dragged along on a bizarre and hilarious quest through the back streets of Tampa on a mission to rescue his misguided young grand-niece.