Mel Edison is a well-paid executive of a high-end Manhattan firm, which has suddenly hit the skids, and he gets the ax. His wife Edna takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked.

Compounded by the air-pollution killing his plants, and with the walls of the apartment being paper-thin, allowing him a constant earful of his neighbours private lives, things can't seem to get any worse... Then he's robbed, and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money.

Mel does the only thing left for him to do - he has a nervous breakdown and it's the best thing that ever happened to him.


"A gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty by sympathetic humor...A talent for writing a wonderful funny life...full of humor and intelligence. Fine fun." - New York Post

"Creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor from the city's manholes." - Time