While the time frame of the novel is two weeks, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome spans more than thirty years, as it shifts backward and forward in time, evoking life in places as diverse as South Dakota, Chicago, suburban Connecticut, New York City, to Houston. The life of Carla, a talented jazz singer, has been an at once joyful and sorrowful odyssey. The many people she has met, in pursuit of her own artistic vision and authority, are uncommon, no matter how common some of their backgrounds might seem: churchgoers, preachers, intellectuals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, thugs, entrepreneurs, fashion models, blues players, high class waiters, writers, athletes, racists and so on. As she learns through living and listening, we visit malls, crack houses, church services, jazz clubs, card parties, fancy restaurants, art shows, funerals, and city streets where life is affirmed, challenged, and even murderously threatened. Clara's love affairs and sexual encounters with a South Dakota boy, a Negro bluesman in Chicago, an Irish broker in New York, countryand western musicians, a Vietnam veteran and drummer, and finally Maxwell, each reveals different things about her and around her -- the world in which those men live and work.

At the heart of the novel is a dark and brutal secret that Carla has shared with no one, and that illumines the complexity of her love for Maxwell, beset as it is by impending doom. Riveting love story that it is, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome is more: a true American epic that provocatively explores the fault lines of the so-called divides of race, ethnicity and class bedeviling our society.