The year is 1969, the end of a revolutionary decade, when men walked the moon and controversies raged over the Vietnam War, civil rights, women's liberation, morality and its decline. A liberated Rabbit Angstrom loses his wife to a hotshot used car salesman dripping with Vitalis and acquires a menage that includes his teenage son, a spaced-out white chick, and an evangelical black man. Rabbit lives a life that is bent, a normal life refracted in a funhouse mirror. He courts complications, all the more bizarre for their believability.