In City of the Mind Lively uses an unusual narrative structure, which readers accustomed to conventional novels may find jarring and distracting. The main narrative, about Matthew Halland and his professional and personal life, makes up the bulk of the work, but it is sporadically interrupted by segments of the four subnarratives concerning past inhabitants of London.

Lively deftly engineers these shifts between main narrative and subnarratives using a series of hinges, or linking motifs. The hinge is usually an emotion or insight Matthew experiences that is similar to one experienced by an earlier denizen of the neighborhood in which he finds himself. Lively's method is to cut at this point from the main narrative to the counterpart moment in the subnarrative and to play the latter scene out, in lengths varying from a paragraph to several pages, before returning to the interrupted main narrative.

Thus, for example...