A Precarious Man

"A PRECARIOUS MAN tells the story of thirty-something Nick Moran's struggle to find a meaningful life in a rootless and precarious world-a world where social insecurity is the rule, middle-class aspirations are out of reach, and genuine intimacy seems an all but forgotten dream. Nick is one of that tribe you hear about often enough: an English PhD who can't find a job. Even when he does, years later and after a second career as a hack Hollywood screenwriter falls apart, the department at a university in Sydney, Australia, turns out to be a hornet's nest of paranoia (think "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings"), arbitrary power, and guilt by association. When a consensual affair with a student leads to scandal and public disgrace, he convinces himself that the world has become a kind of limbo, where human dignity has no value and people live in denial of the ways their actions have lost any purpose, their words and feelings any substance. His path back to normalcy takes him to New York, where he falls into another limbo of drugs and sex, and then to Paris, where he helps his old friend Haley, caught in a scandal similar to his own, back from an edge of madness"--