Nick Moran is an English literature PhD who cannot find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Auckland, New Zealand, turns out to be a hornet's nest of paranoia, arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When a consensual affair with a student leads to tabloid-style scandal and public disgrace, he convinces himself that the world is a kind of limbo, where human dignity has no meaning and people live in denial of the ways their actions have lost any purpose, their words and feelings any substance or value. His path back to normalcy takes him to New York, where he falls into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his old friend Haley, caught in a scandal similar to his own, back from an edge of madness.
