The Cold War is at its apex: John F. Kennedy's government faces down the Soviets over the Cuban missiles. At this moment of terror, Timothy Brown King, disengaged and disenchanted, abandons his illusory Ivy League life on a Joycean journey of exile and cunning. He will test the limits of his imagination and, in the process, confront the truth about his deceased father, a powerful but enigmatic Establishment figure, and probe the mystery of his parentage, of personal identity itself.

Having announced "that his lifelong goal was to never ever believe in anything," Timothy is bent on "the genesis of a new life, the new manifesto, the promise of forbidden discovery and exposure."