David Enders, pilot for the French Army during the Great War, returns to Connecticut after wandering post-war France with a condition similar to shell-shocked men from the trenches. At home he must contend with a difficult father, a sister locked in a mysterious post-influenza coma, and a volatile country still in the grips of wartime paranoia and civil liberty restrictions. He finds work building houses in Old Lyme, a summertime town of bootleggers, rum runners, flappers, clammers, crooked deputies, and the famous Old Lyme Art Colony whose impressionist painters don't want their bucolic landscapes marred by cookie-cutter cottages. Enders falls in love with one of those artists, but encircled by suffocating customs, illiberal laws, and petty criminals, they're looking for an escape.
David Enders, pilot for the French Army during the Great War, returns to Connecticut after wandering post-war France with a condition similar to shell-shocked men from the trenches. At home he must contend with a difficult father, a sister locked in a mysterious post-influenza coma, and a volatile country still in the grips of wartime paranoia and civil liberty restrictions. He finds work building houses in Old Lyme, a summertime town of bootleggers, rum runners, flappers, clammers, crooked deputies, and the famous Old Lyme Art Colony whose impressionist painters don't want their bucolic landscapes marred by cookie-cutter cottages. Enders falls in love with one of those artists, but encircled by suffocating customs, illiberal laws, and petty criminals, they're looking for an escape.
