In an idyllic American village, elderly romantic Lemuel Sears still has it in him to fall wildly in love with strangers of both sexes.But Sears's paradise is under threat; the pond he loves is being fouled by unscrupulous polluters involved in organised crime.Can Sears thwart the monstrous aspects of late-twentieth-century civilisation and save his beloved village?Cheever's wry fable of modern American is interlaced with musings on everything from the etiquette of supermarket queues to the evolution of the ice-skate.