In Curtis White's first novel, The Idea of Home, he attempts to "imagine a place in which humans can live." This utopia is definitely not San Lorenzo—a postwar, prefabricated suburb in California—where White grew up and which is the basis for this novel.

From the vantage point of an off-kilter adulthood, White spins recent American history together with personal observations and investigations into the dark heart of American suburbia. Shocking, yet very funny and always learned, The Idea of Home is a mix of the personal and the philosophical in an energetic collage that would resemble the biographies of Nietzsche and Mark Twain if they had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and '60s.