It is about a poet, Harry Quirk, who having been thrown out of the family apartment at the Astral by his wife Luz, attempts to get his life back together.

Daniel Handler, reviewing The Astral in The New York Times, called it "an object lesson on the current realist novel, with its pitfalls and pleasures both as clear as the book’s unsentimental vision."

But then when I open a novel, I expect something other than the ordinary circumstances that already surround me, be it in language or story.

To expect otherwise, as Christensen does in “The Astral,” seems a little, well, unrealistic.

"[1] The Washington Post found "that Christensen has somehow — again — created a captivatingly believable male narrator".