Joe Biden

Joe is the novel’s central character, its narrator and protagonist. He is a fictionalized version of the real-world Joe Biden, a career politician representing the state of Delaware who, for eight years, was Vice-President in the administration of Barack Obama. The novel’s version of Joe seems to share several characteristics with the real-world Joe, including loyalty, commitment to service, and a degree of outspokenness and spontaneity. In the novel, as in the real world, all three seem to both motivate and define virtually everything Joe says and does.

As the novel begins, Joe is struggling with feelings of emptiness, infirmity, and abandonment. To be specific, he feels emptiness because his days are no longer filled with the activities and responsibilities of a political life, and experiences infirmity because he feels his body is not as able or as fit as it used to be. Finally...