Henny lives in an unhappy marriage in a working-class neighborhood of Boston, raising several adopted children, and in the very first pages of the book, locks her husband in a closet to talk to God. Her friends—the esoteric enthusiast Libby and the wheelchair-bound political activist Lewis, her first love—accompany her through life; their conversations mingle with Nietzsche and Bambi, John the Baptist and Marx, anarchism and Catholicism. Issues of race, gender, class, and religion flare and fade in the novel, time flows backward, but the fragile and unstable figure of the narrator, a modern-day martyr, binds together the narrative, masterfully crafted by Howe. Indivisible is a nonlinear philosophical novel that continually surprises with its linguistic discoveries.