October 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Seventeen years after the end of World War II, war is once again looming between east and west, the good guys and the bad guys, the cowboys and the Indians.

The novel is set in a small town in France, on October 27 of that year. The day before the ultimatum.

Hard-Head is a child who tries not to attract the attention of the adults around him. There’s his father, a boastful, macho Italian. His mother, who tries ineffectually to keep their household running smoothy. The three of them live in a public housing. The neighbors, the dogs… Everyone’s on top of everyone else. And everyone makes everyone’s else’s lives their business.

Hard-Head absorbs the tension around him without understanding the issue. He can tell the adults are worried, which worries him, too. He hears them using words he doesn’t understand. He sees his parents getting into a heated argument over issues that escape him. He is stunned by the world around him, a world that has literally become hysterical.

Scolded, mistreated, and shunted between his mother and his father, Hard-Head will reach the end of this mad, strange day like Zazie at the end of Queneau’s novel: older and wiser...