Adrift in self-imposed emotional and spiritual oblivion, reclusive attorney Richard Jason Steele struggles through alarming personal and professional anxieties to isolate and define the roots of his lethargy by embracing yet ultimately rejecting the philosophical paradigms of his one-time intellectual idol Ludwig Wittgenstein. His escalating deconstruction of the philosopher's magnum opus Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus parallels the collapse of his own legacy upon arrest for a violent crime that pits his own ethical theories against the grim realities of life under the threat of execution. In his growing anguish Steele probes beyond metaphysical voids that only Houllebecq so far has stared head-on: "Not everything can be explained. There is thought and so there is reason, and so there is hope but inevitably, despair. An inanimate idea would be the perfect expression of infinity as a conscious state of mind... a parallax portal by which one could stop living momentarily in organic terms, perhaps long enough to exchange ideas with God."