Nick Moran is one of that hapless tribe you hear about on occasion: an English PhD who can't find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Auckland, New Zealand, turns out to be a hornet's nest of paranoia (think "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings"), arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When his consensual relationship with a student leads not just to scandal and public disgrace but a threat of prosecution for "human rights violations," he finds himself in a still more confounding limbo of uncertain identity and thwarted hope. His path out of despair takes him to New York, where he slips into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his best friend Haley, lost in her own shadows, back from an edge of madness.