The title of the antinovel The Food in the Manger refers to the characters, to how they are in various ways abject and philosophically desperate, and, as if in a grotesque stuntedness or foreshortening of the Christ myth, unable to figure out how to be or feel useful to society except as dehumanized objects, fuel, basically. This book is a place where the social pale is not a line, and not even really a white hole that everything darts and starves from - it's just a haze, ungraspable cloud of a field of poppies - yet the characters want it - want to attain whatever is truly the social side of it - when they wake enough to want anything. But they think that by giving joy to powerful people as if those powers are God's viceroys, jailers, guards of us-who-gravitate-toward-the-earth, they can give joy to God. The book starts out being about depressed, nihilistic, alienated teenagers trying to leave the world. Stuart, losing his mind, believes that Alex is pure evil because Alex seems happy and indifferent, and so he worships Alex. Alex, confused and frightened, wanders off into his own interior, a subtle private chaos. People try to start religions about Alex, and it seems this is just because he doesn't understand them. It is said he will walk up to them accompanied by a new God. In the second section, Window and Lauria are lovers and film artists, courting the edge (the hurdle) of the social pale, and eventually abandoning it. Window wants to end as a martyr to the uncanny beauty of innocent suffering, though he knows, and eventually admits to himself, that he himself is not innocent enough to be beautiful this way. Lauria wants to revolutionize language so that all communication becomes high art, grave, intense, and sacred.