A man with no illusions marries a young woman who is brimming with idealism. She attempts to remake her husband with her overflowing optimism, but the marriage is severely strained when her first pregnancy ends in miscarriage. They separate, and the woman has a number of affairs, but eventually she returns to her husband. They have a daughter, then settle down to a life that is a blend of the husband's worldliness and the wife's idealism.

Marcus and Kate moved to a residential neighborhood in New England. He is a frustrated architect, she is a young housewife who has discontinued her studies. The daily newspaper of a crisis is strictly narrated among the immutable spaces of the bourgeois suburbs: houses, gardens, shopping centers.