In an unspecified time and place in America, teenaged Edward Rawlinson paints watercolors, watches his older brother Burke romance pretty, horse-riding Christine, and retreats into his visual adoration of bicycle reflectors, Victorian picture frames, linen tablecloths, and heftily built men. As Ed matures, his ability to lose himself in the sensual, fractalesque aspects of everyday life -including hazelnuts, antique fans, and doorbells-will lead him to a happy, tender relationship and life of security with Lawrence, an aging professor, but also to an avoidant, labyrinthine relationship with the practical world of "straight lines." With its strange, slow-paced portrait of a young man quietly determined to engage with society on his own terms, Hands and Straight Lines creates a calm yet unsettling zone of ambivalence that reconfigures the traditional bildungsroman into a mysterious meditation on adulthood and the good life.