The novel interweaves Alice's musings about his decline as she visits him in a succession of assisted living facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area with her increasing obsession with the life and career of Tehching Hsieh, a retired Taiwanese artist in New York known for year-long performance art projects.

The reviewer for Publishers Weekly said that it contributed to a "deeply empathic portrayal" with "careful and illuminating observations on issues of cultural difference, productivity, family, and freedom".

[1] Steph Cha wrote in The New York Times that Chen "set out to write an unconventional, rambling novel of ideas and make it hang together with minimal narrative tension"; she described the novel as "an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life".

[3] The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote that "[t]he whole novel reads like a project coming into existence" and called it "a meditation on human frailty and endurance [that shows] how we cling to our chosen work and the hope buried within it".

[2] The reviewer for Booklist referred to the novel as "[a]mbitiously inquisitive and ingeniously compelling" and wrote that it "confronts the liminal spaces between identities, languages, expectations, realities".