Summer is beginning and a lawn party is in progress to welcome home a graduate from a famous East Coast college. Among the guests there to congratulate him is the wife of his father's law partner. She asks him for a ride home. At her house he accepts a drink. They talk. She invites him upstairs to view an oil portrait of her daughter. He admires it briefly, then turns around to see her seated on the edge of a bed. Thus begine Ben Braddock's twenty second summer and a series of events that quickly disrupt the course of his life and shatter the serenity of all those around him.