Waltz of the Innocents paints a bittersweet life on a huge canvas as Marsh Bretz blunders through the social movements of the late Twentieth Century.

The shrewd country boy with deep German-speaking Russian background yearns for a wife and children bound together by love, tolerance and understanding. Yet, Marsh likes strong empowered women, his equals. Disregarding conflicts with his lovers´ and wives´ career and personal priorities, he stubbornly remains a tolerant man in an intolerant time, a doubter in the land of the true believer. And yet his chaotic personal life and thwarted goals has a strange vitalizing effect.

Too frugal to buy clothes that fit, the good-hearted man uses every opportunity, every good gamble, to turn life´s losses into unexpected gains. Bailing a friend out of trouble, Marsh begins his first company-and then another. One way or other, the opportunist turns flaming wrecks into marshmallow roasts. Feminism, litigation, environmental disaster--all deal him setbacks. Yet if life flattens Marsh to the wall, Marsh takes the wall in compensation, and makes a good profit.

Alternately amusing in his bumbling naiveté and sardonic humor, gentle and thoughtful in his ill-planned affairs and marriages, and grim and cold-blooded when antagonized--Marsh reflects the moral turmoil of the times. His quest for his family and his values carries him from well-to-do life in Montreal, Denver and Saint Petersburg to the lonely starkness of the Canadian Arctic, the gold mining gulags of Siberia and to his family´s farm on the lower Volga. Business, politics and personal life blur. Yet his stubborn quest will never end until the goal is achieved.