Protagonist Leo Gold attends the annual Anarchists’ Convention in New York City, a spectacle predictably filled with divisions and subcommittees and impassioned debates over topics as banal as the order of events and whether dinner should be self-serve. But when the hotel manager asks the party to vacate the room as previously booked, the group unites to build barricades and sing protest songs to defend their noble cause.

A young anarchist woman married to a man with the same political views navigates the complexities of religion and forbidden attraction as she watches her friends' marriage collapse due to the wife's conversion to Christianity.

The daughter of draft-defying anarchists in the post-World War II era marries a man whose father died in the war. As their differing pasts lead to resentment in the present, she engages in deception and affairs as a means of finding freedom from his presence.