The framing device for this novel is the brutal rape and murder of a young boy in a suburban neighborhood, which is never solved. But what the book really is about are the fundamental changes our “safe” middle-class world went through in the 1970s, including divorce, senseless crime and the encroachment of the outside world on the suburban cocoons we had built for ourselves. This small, quiet novel paints a portrait of these changes in deft, succinct strokes.