This novella -- about an orphaned sex offender, his relationships with women, his loneliness, his sense of existential absurdity and his bizarre road to self-healing and self-worth -- is a work of exceptional uniqueness. At times unabashedly scatological and frank in its sexology, this short novel, set in San Francisco, manages to take full measure of the loneliness and the thwarted desires of an outsider living on the fringes of society.