N is employed at a prestigious California university, where he has distinguished himself as an aloof and somewhat eccentric presence. His meticulous, ordered life is violently disrupted by the death of his estranged father-- unanticipated and, as it increasingly seems to N, surrounded by murky circumstances. After a chance meeting with a young doctor, N begins to have vivid, almost hallucinatory daydreams about the year he spent in Ottawa, and a shameful...