James Reedeth is a young psychologist at New York's major mental health institution who is disenchanted with his job and his employer, the revered Elias Mogshack.

Lyla Clay is a "pythoness," a young woman capable of metabolising certain psychedelic drugs to enter a trance in which she makes unconscious predictions.

Matthew Flamen, a "spoolpigeon" (a variety of investigative journalist), is struggling to hold onto his job, and by his obsessive behaviour has driven his wife into Mogshack's asylum.

Analog reviewer P. Schuyler Miller praised the novel as a "beautiful job—intricate yet tightly constructed, thoroughly believable with as many important characters as a Victorian classic.

"[1] James Blish, however, lambasted The Jagged Orbit for pursuing an already exhausted mainstream model, producing a text "embodying almost none of Brunner's strengths, loaded to the gunwales with typographical tricks, as full of compulsive cuteness as Stalin-era Shostakovich, its very length pretentious and inhibiting, containing a vast cast of characters all of whom are in the end regressions to the funny-hat school".