Story

Jim, a 30-year-old attorney in New Orleans has an affair with Aimee, a strikingly beautiful 22-year-old court reporter who has moved from San Francisco to the French Quarter. Jim leaves his wife and young son and moves in with his mistress in the French Quarter. He is a conservative attorney and she is a totally uninhibited free spirit, and the novel describes them trying to reconcile their conflicting lifestyles. They party with friends living in the French Quarter who are trying to find themselves.

Aimee entices him to move to San Francisco after Mardi Gras. However, during Mardi Gras he reestablishes a relationship with his young son when he takes him to Mardi Gras for Mardi Gras parades and parties, and has to decide whether he will move with his beautiful, wild young girlfriend to San Francisco or stay in New Orleans with his young son, and the novel builds to a hypnotic ending.

Return to Mardi Gras is set in the 1970's and the characters had been in college during the student revolution-hippie years and are trying to put their lives back together after dropping out, drug usage and having anti-establishment attitudes. Therefore, it is a period novel about the lost generation from that era and is symbolic of the "Age of Aquarius".