**From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral comes a
funny, chilling novel set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest,
featuring a young woman whose moral goodness may destroy her.
**
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a
father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the
men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the
process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike
husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional
realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent
that is at once pitiless and compassionate.