The novel focuses on the stories of three friends in their early thirties, living in Manhattan in the months leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Danielle Minkoff is the only one of her friends to hold a steady job, working as a producer for a TV program that makes documentaries.

Years earlier, Marina secured a contract to write a book about children's fashion, and having used up all her advance money and facing a hard deadline, moves back into her childhood home with her parents.

Meanwhile, Julius Clarke, a brilliant and witty critic for The Village Voice, cannot sustain himself with his literary work and is forced to take temporary jobs to supplement his income—which he finds demeaning.

Meanwhile, Danielle begins two flirtations, one with Ludovic Seeley, an Australian editor who has moved to New York City to start a literary journal The Monitor (named after Le Moniteur Universel) and another with Marina's father Murray, who begins an email correspondence at first using her job and later concern over Marina's unemployment as reasons to keep contacting her.

Marina, still hanging on to the last traces of her It-girl status, is unsettled by the arrival of her 19-year-old cousin Bootie, who has dropped out of university to pursue a program of educating himself by his own design.

Bootie reveres the Thwaites and looks up to his uncle Murray, in whose footsteps he wants to follow; but Marina is dismissive, calling him "Fat Fredrick".

At their wedding, Danielle asks Murray to spend an entire night with her, something he has never done, always returning home after their trysts to his wife, Annabel.

At the headquarters of The Monitor, Seeley realizes that his project is completely doomed as the launch was to take place that day, but the attacks mean that the magazine cannot go to print, and that all the articles will seem obsolete anyway.

She enlists the Thwaites to help find her son, and though they manage to track down the temp agency where he worked, they are unable to locate him and assume he has died.

[10] The film is being produced by Brian Grazer; Ron Howard was originally slated to direct as well, but left to work on The Dilemma.