Novel written by Michael Chabon published in 1988. Unlike most other books, the paperback lacks a helpful blurb on the back cover to provide a browser with a useful synopsis. What it does have, however, is a plethora of useful comments:

"Simply, the best first novel I've read in years....It will find its place beside On the Road and Catcher in the Rye."
-Carolyn Forché

"Abolutely terrific...Michael Chabon continues in that great tradition (of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby)....Anybody can write a realistic account of his first postgraduation summer of growing up and making love, but to make such a story the stuff of legend, as Chabon has done here (and Fitzgerald did before him), takes something close to genius."
-Playboy

In actuality, the novel is about finding one's self. A typical theme of the 60s, Chabon simply changes the setting. Over the course of the summer, the narrator, Arthur Bechstein, partakes in numerous "adventures" which coalesce to form a new basis of identity. Any detail with respect to those adventures would simply spoil the book.