In this literary love story, Marcus Weiss, a loyal denizen of New York City, retires at age fifty to work on a dictionary he has grandly titled "The Human Gesture in Western Literature." Comparing himself to Flaubert, who read fifteen hundred books in order to compose his Bouvard and Pécuchet—Marcus immerses himself in literature, culling quotations and passages for his dictionary and treating his friends to impromptu readings of the "pearls" he finds, all the while lecturing them about the emptiness and futility of consumerism. His lover, Gina, and his best friend, Oscar, do their best to indulge him, but when they've had enough, they poke fun at this modern-day "prophet." One day, while Marcus is at work in his warm and secluded study, an old man invades his imagination, and Marcus, enchanted, allows the old man entry and begins to write his biography. Soon, time distinctions blur: does Marcus, as he looks far into the future, imagine himself as an old man, living alone with his books, or is the old man the actual Marcus, now eighty years old, looking back and recounting a time in his life when his dear ones—Gina, Oscar, and all his other contemporaries—were still living?