As these intimate glimpses of people's lives follow each other like stills from a movie, the reader is reminded of family photographs laid out at random on a table in some comfortable modern home, where everything is "just so" and as nice as afternoon tea...If only! Hidden in the vignettes of personal affairs, with their reminders of Updike and de Maupassant, are all the vexations of our age. As we move from country to country we enter people's homes - and closets - and discover a multitude of tragedies and joys. We meet serial wives, alcoholism, paranoia and prison, prejudice and sexual abuse, unknown parents, church elders taken in sin, neighbors from Hell, and the rewards of devotion to our spouse and our Maker.