One thing in my defence, not that it matters: I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing. Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth’s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and pleasure, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires and motives – the epitome of a generation made ill by too much freedom. More than five decades after its original publication, this book remains a profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s.