1960, in a mid-sized city somewhere in the Midwest. Bud and Gloria Young are the newest homeowners in a freshly built suburban cul-de-sac, the only residents except for their neighbors Dean and Liz. The two couples have nothing yet everything--the pursuit of the American post-war dream, of children, home, and prosperity--in common: Bud is a diffident sales executive bitterly estranged from his small-town roots; Gloria (who "looks just like Grace Kelly"), cool and proper, wants nothing more than a child; Liz, is wry, worldly, and alcoholic; and then there is Dean, opaque, voracious, devious yet at times almost tender-hearted. As their involvement deepens over cocktails, dinner parties, hunting trips, and yet more cocktails, their "greatest generation" shared world of prescribed commitments and roles is silently and steadily intruded upon by ambiguities--social, moral, but especially sexual--that change everyone and everything. All this passes unacknowledged until it is far too late, observed by no one except Dean and Liz's affectless son Chad ("the moon-eyed boy"), who is outwardly alive to nothing except the television but who sees and ultimately understands what his elders cannot, the future into which they all are unwittingly moving.Both raw and lyrical, unsentimental but compassionate, Heaven is in the tradition of Updike and Cheever, but also of Michael Cunningham and Edmund White, a post-modern novel set in the heart of the modern era that uncannily and movingly describes the way we were but also the way we live now.