A writer meets a woman, Lila. Agains the backdrop of neofeminism, they fall in love. "I ask Lila if her feminism is essentialist, difference, universalist, queer, or pro-sex. She mischievously replies, 'I'm my own gender. I love men who love women.'"
What is a novel? A diagnosis of an era's symptoms. Clearly, something fundamental is also unacceptable: that a man and a woman can be truly, humanly happy as equals. "You see the reigning confusion: marches, media, nihilism, naming names, religious conflict, offensive Islam, migrants, the search for love: you have the stuff of a symphony here."