Peter Sagamore and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore, both thirty-nine years old, are the book's joint protagonists and narrators. Peter is a college professor and a moderately successful writer who began his writing career with a thick novel full of the abundance of life. But he has become "a writer's writer," which in his case means a painstaking minimalist whose meticulously pared down work reaches silence at the book's opening. His hugely pregnant wife (eight and a half months, with at least twins) immediately recognizes the dangerous urgency of this problem: Her husband's entire identity, his life, is dependent upon his being a writer. And the depth of their love means that her life is dependent upon his. Eventually the reader discovers that Peter has been silenced by his knowledge of the world: His ex-student and "CIA friend" Doug Townshend has been passing Peter information about his own and others'...