Astoria is an original and powerful vision of the Great Migration, full of startling angels and unexpected daggers of truth. The narrator is a man deranged by history and grief. For him, the real capital of the world is a place called Astoria, the Italian neighborhood in Queens where his mother was a child in the 1920s. Now it is 1986, two years after her death. He has gone to teach literature at the University of Paris. At the tomb of Napoleon, he discovers she has not left him.

For the narrator, she is Napoleon. No matter where he goes, he finds himself still in Astoria, her revolutionary empire. From Paris to New York to Rome, he meets her monuments at every turn. To break her hold on him, he weaves theory after theory, writes one history after another. His struggle reveals her as the will, the incest, and the magic of the Great Migration, its fury, its rage, its unappeasable desire. Astoria is an experiment in what Robert Viscusi calls speculative history.

In his first book, Max Beerbohm or The Dandy Dante (1986), Viscusi developed the theory of a history of what might be, rather than what has actually been.