There are families like the Beans all over America. They live on the wrong side of town in mobile homes strung with Christmas lights all year round. The women are often pregnant, the men drunk and just out of jail, and the children too numerous to count. There is cousin Rubie, a boozer and a brawler; tall Aunt Roberta, the earth mother surrounded by countless clinging babies; and Beal, sensitive, often gentle, but doomed by the violence within him
