Mahatma Gandhi in a Cadillac

the long version

Danny Schwartz is a Jewish kid from the Bronx streets. He has faithfully been performing every act demanded of him to get ahead in fifties America. At the rate he's going, he's sure to be a success. His parents, children of immigrants, are proud of his engineering degree and boast that he's first in his class at Wharton, where he's going for an M.B.A. He's landed a plum summer job, helping to build missiles in Seattle. He's closing in on that future it's all leading to, looking for a few sweet shiksas on the side. Then he meets Leslie Schmidt. She's a German-Catholic Idaho farm girl who has just arrived in town via freight, kicked out of her convent for reading Bertrand Russell and Sartre. Leslie turns out to be a hellion, smarting from a rough past of sailors, booze, reformatories, and swamis who practiced tantric sex with her and others. But hey, Danny's not quite what he's cracked up to be either. He's pathologically morose, obsessed with his own death/the meaninglessness of life, drinking at night. Coltrane, Lenny Bruce, and Jack Kerouac supply more answers to him than Wharton, but they aren't exactly the heroes of the day.