Eliot Rosewater is tortured by a fabulous inheritance he feels he does not deserve, so he devotes himself to drink, and to a life serving the dull, the ugly, the irrelevant and the useless. This is a novel about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money. It is the story of a millionaire's lunacy, the obsessions of a famous family and the collective madness of a nation.