A quarter of a century ago, Andrew Barclay wrote a best-selling novel. He has never produced another book. Now a young PhD student from Los Angeles has tracked down the recluse to a backward town in a third-world Central American country.
Looking for material for her thesis, she visits the writer; but instead of the brilliant author of memorable prose she finds an aging alcoholic whose twenty-five-year effort to produce another novel has generated nothing he deems worthy of publication. But Barclay is oddly certain that despite all his failures one day he will produce his second book.