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Will Lightman is one of life's visitors, drifting in and out of life's eternal cocktail party, but never throwing one of his own. Due to a happy accident of birth -- his father wrote the perennial, royalty-generating Christmas favorite, "Santa's Super Sleigh" -- Will has never really had to work: "Every day for the last eighteen years he had got up in the morning with the intention of sorting out his career problem once and for all; as the day wore on, however, his desire to seek a place for himself in the outside world somehow got extinguished." One by one his friends and former lovers have drifted away into marriages and careers. At 36, Will is mostly alone, desperately hip, but with fewer and fewer acquaintances to share in the hipness. He spends his days reading, watching television, or driving in the press of London traffic to give him the sense of being "plugged in," a part of something larger than his diminished social circumstances.

A chance affair with a lonely single mother provides a welcome variation on a familiar theme, and though the affair ends when the woman begins to worry that Will is beginning to get too serious, Will's eyes are opened to the opportunity for endless low-emotional-risk liaisons.

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