Purdy draws on the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, GŸnter Grass, Samuel Becket, and Eugene Ionesco to examine ways in which novelists explore the unknown. He considers Henry James in conjunction with these novelists, and with scientific discoveries and advances—black holes, hydrogen bombs, space travel—to offer new insights into James's work and into the twentieth-century view of humanity's place in the world.