More specifically, White Light uses an imaginary universe to elucidate the set theory concept of aleph numbers, which are more or less the idea that some infinities are bigger than others.

The book is the story of Felix Rayman, a down-and-out mathematics teacher at SUCAS (a state college in New York, a play on SUNY) with a troubled family life and dead-in-the-water career.

In the fictional town of Bernho (Geneseo), he begins experimenting with lucid dreaming—aided by "fuzz weed" (marijuana)—hoping to gain insight into Cantor's continuum hypothesis.

The ball has unusual properties such as ignoring gravity or being indivisible, or to be more precise, being a physical instantiation of the Banach–Tarski paradox, which means it can be broken apart into multiple pieces, each of which is exactly like the original.

Thomas M. Disch praised White Light as "a good, intelligent, powerful novel," describing it as "a sort of cross between Raymond Chandler and Lewis Carroll (another mathematicizing fabulist) with a tip of the hat along the way to Franz Kafka.