Wallace is a biochemistry grad student at a lakeside Midwestern university used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. His class is the first in more than three decades to include a black student, something Wallace has not been allowed to forget. But, over the course of one weekend at the end of summer, a series of confrontations with colleagues and an unexpected shift in his relationship with a friend, Miller, force him to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.