Ethan Baum leaves his broken marriage, his failed romance, and his overbearing father, a famous philosopher, back East and heads out to New Mexico, where he hopes to make a fresh start and end the writer's block that has halted his once promising career as a novelist. Once in Albuquerque, he loses his job, finds himself with an older woman and her anorexic daughter, and becomes involved with suspicious grandees, cynical environmentalists, ruthless mining interests, a possible war criminal, and an unlikely Ivy League Navajo. As their stories crisscross his own, Ethan's suppressed memories surface and he has to question his understanding of himself and his real relations with others. In all this Ethan's sense of living through literature and language becomes more problematic: the more hopeless things become, the funnier they seem, until he isn't sure he can survive his new self-knowledge.