[2][3] Reed makes several attempts to break out of his mundane existence in academia—with little success—until he meets the 26-year-old student performance artist and amateur stripper, Flower Cannon.

"[9]Robert Stone in The New York Times praised Johnson's poetry infused prose: "The world rushing by is sometimes imperfectly realized, sometimes bleak, occasionally luminous.

[14] Smith emphasizes this point: "...the crucial elements of the novel, like where and when it takes place, begin to matter less and less as the story progresses..."[15][16] Protagonist Michael Reed—"a relatively solid citizen"—is not among the "misfits, drug-addicts and forgotten portrayed in Johnson's Jesus's Son or Angels.

"[17][18] According to critic Jean Charbonneau, the characters that inhabit the Reed's professional milieu are nonetheless "psychologically impaired and are searching for themselves, [among them] uninterested professors, self-absorbed writers, well-off individuals who can't find happiness in their comfortable existence.

"[19] Reed's "quiet desperation"[20] manifests itself in a form of "dependency" according to critic Michael Miller, "Johnson here portrays a different sort of addiction, not so much to lost loved ones as to going through the motions of grief.

"[21] Critic William H. Cobb rejects any thematic identification of Reed's interest in Flower Cannon as a "May–December" romance: The narrative leads the reader to think the novel may be another obsessive-love story between student and professor, à la Francine Prose's latest, Blue Angel, but that's where Johnson pulls a surprise.