"Edward Steinke, with all the ambition and steadfastness of his twenty-four years, believes in only one thing: Perfect Execution. This is the sales technique he has gleaned from the forgotten business guru Alfred Orditz, whose 1954 masterpiece, Classic Sales: Theory and Technique, has become Ed's secular New Testament. Unfortunately for Ed, he is selling the Brackett 180-X piano organ at the South Exhibition Hall of a large Midwestern state fair, and Perfect Execution seems perfectly useless.

Barry Steinke, Ed's alternately sullen and swaggering younger brother, is less than supportive. Having already surrendered his adolescent dreams of musical stardom with his group, The Hotels, Barry foresees nothing for himself beyond the state fair and the summer's end, a void he knows simply as "And then."".

"Between the brothers comes Leila Genet, imaginative but timid, frozen by life, who wanders the South Exhibition Hall looking to escape for a little while into "the stupid happiness of the Fair." Barry falls for her as Ed falls into doubt, debt, and - perhaps - for Leila too. And then comes the surprisingly difficult matter of convincing Leila that neither of them are, in fact, as unbalanced as they seem."--BOOK JACKET.