The book begins with the death of a man, provoked by a bomb that leaves him in pieces, unrecognizable. There are no witnesses, it is impossible to identify the victim. But there is one person, Peter Aaron, who knows who is this man: Benjamin Sachs, his best friend for years, and he tries to reconstruct the story of his life and their years of friendship. Both writers, they shared interests, ideas, had many affinities. After a broken marriage, Ben led a turbulent life, living in different cities, constantly moving houses, sometimes no one knew where he was. He had relationships with different women, with whom he lived for some time until he disappeared again. To Peter, Ben was not only a friend, but also "an emblem of the unknowable". The narrative is, in a way, like a labyrinth of the relationship between the biographer (Peter Aaron) and the biographed (Benjamin Sachs).
There is no doubt that this is a political novel portraying American society, and also a fiction about conceptions of literature. It contains explicit sexual passages.