This politically pornographic tale of the collapse of the American republic is an outrageously over-the-top reworking of a seventeenth-century Chinese account of a despicable family, transplanted into contemporary and near-future Baltimore. It narrates the descent into corruption of an elite East Coast family following the demise of its naive paterfamilias. As both plot and family unravel, examples of social malaise such as illiterate texting and technocratic feudalism proliferate, until familial and political rottenness merge together, and America is lost.