Bennet always knew he would live a life in science. From the homemade rockets and experiments of his childhood to the complex equations he solved as a professor of physics, his vision has transformed the uncertainty and frailty of life into order and beauty. But his vision betrays him, revealing a profound incompleteness, an inadequacy to confront the contradictions of his life: the black maid who raises him and loves him but cannot welcome him into her own house, the mentally absent father who wishes he'd died a hero in World War II, the high school teacher who becomes his secret lover and then abandons him, the self-destructive wife who invites Bennet's cruelty. As Bennet struggles between reason and intuition, he slowly learns to allow the imperfections of daily life - the chaos he has worked so hard to control - to broaden his understanding of the world and his place in it.