In the words of Frederick Karl, the breathers "are attempts to break away from historical narrative into simultaneity." Sections in all-caps that do not include the word "BREATHER" and those with titles in normal title-case are mostly straightforward narrations, but they are intricately plotted and intimately related to the more difficult portions. The novel, nominally set in 1976–77, but with long passages set in 1893–4, 1945, 1960–2, and 1973, centers around the life, the partly mythic ancestry, and the partly science fictional future of James Mayn, a business and technology journalist. He lives in the same Lower East Side building as one Grace Kimball. Grace has numerous close ties with just about everyone Jim knows in the novel. These ties include the ordinary, day-to-day interactions with people who know Jim and Grace, and the extraordinary, as Grace's dreams closely parallel the mythic version of Jim's grandmother's life. Jim and Grace "never quite meet", although Jim goes so far as to knock on Grace's door but then changes his mind. There is a MacGuffin in the guise of a never-performed opera "Hamletin" based on Hamlet by a Chilean woman, the mother of the zoologist Mena. The opera apparently has magical powers, anathema to fascists and dictators. A production in a former warehouse in the Upper West Side is in rehearsals. What follows is a version of the events in the novel arranged in a timeline. Large portions of the story are told in a "spiral" style, with a little bit told at first, then repeated with a little bit more, and so on. Often, multiple plotlines are advanced nearly simultaneously, in long rushing sentences that refer to minor details across the decades and centuries. As an example, some important characters go without a name until very late in the novel. Marion Hugh Mayne founds the "Windrow Democrat" as an advocacy newspaper for Andrew Jackson, and writes a diary. He knows Morgan, an Alsatian mathematician. Samuel Colt opens his first factory in Paterson. The factory fails. Inspired by the Mexican War, Samuel Colt opens his second factory in Hartford. One of the pistols has a (double) life of its own. The Statue of Liberty arrives in the U.S. at Bedloe's Island and the pieces are uncrated. Margaret, aged 12, is on the island, looking at the inside of the face, when the Hermit-Inventor tells her to go west.