When his parents divorce, Sean's society page mother has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.
With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations,Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.
