The City (New York)

The community in which the majority of the action takes place is referred to only as the City, an urban development a dense population, lots of money, and a complicated socio-political-economic power structure. In the widely recognized context of the book's thin disguising of reality as fiction, the City is clearly New York, home of large numbers of the exceptionally wealthy, the exceptionally poor, and those who wish they were the former, but fear they are becoming the latter.

America

While the narrative spends very little time referring to anything outside the City (i.e. anything political, social, cultural, or financial), there are enough references in the book's interjected historical commentary that make it clear the City is in America. There are several pointed nods to various, commonly known aspects of American life (such as that country's health care system) that reinforce this sense of...