Joshua Shapiro, James Woods, is a successful writer and pundit who finds himself in a hospital room, seemingly having lost his wife and entangled in a public sex scandal. To discover what life means to him, he retraces the arc of his days—from youth to the present—reconstructing memories that feel both revealing and perilous.
Joshua grows up as a Jew in the working-class St. Urbain Street neighborhood of Montreal, a background that shapes the tone of his later reflections. His upbringing is described as unusual: his father was a boxer who had become a gentle crook, and his mother was a strip-tease dancer. Embarrassingly, she strips for his friends as part of a Bar Mitzvah party for him. Joshua’s father is shown as possessing a distinctive and provocative perspective on life, sex, and religion, a perspective that looms large over his son’s sense of morality and identity.
A trip to Spain as a young man serves as the spark that launches his career as a journalist and writer. Later, in England, a momentary lapse in judgment leads him to forge letters about a (fake) homosexual affair with a British writer to sell to an American university archive. He then crosses paths with an upper-class Canadian married to a poseur of a communist and persuades her to become his wife. She is Pauline, the daughter of a Canadian senator, and through this union Joshua gains entry into a social circle he has long looked down upon, even as he remains critical of the world he now inhabits.
Meanwhile, Joshua’s childhood friends have grown successful in their own right, a contrast that multiplies the tension in his life. Some of them become targets for bizarre pranks as he uses old resentments to settle scores, weaving a jagged trail of memories that threaten to unravel him.
Joshua’s conceited brother-in-law enters the scene as a pivotal figure, revealed to be insecure and vulnerable. Neighbors in the wealthy cottage community around Lake Memphremagog pull him further into a web of questionable choices, and the consequences grow increasingly grave. As the past resurfaces, old indiscretions come back to haunt him in ways that force him to confront the shambles of his life and decide what, if anything, remains of the person he thought he was.
