Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2 Summary

Chapter 1 - A young man browses a bookstore crowded with both books and customers, eventually finding copies of the two novels written by Bill Gray and witnessing a quiet altercation between a poorly dressed street person and security. The young man, eventually identified as Scott, leaves the bookstore and makes his way to an art gallery, where he browses works by pop artist Andy Warhol, paying particular attention to representations of the face of Mao Zedong (Chairman Mao). After leaving the gallery, Scott makes his way to the lobby of a hotel, where he keeps an appointment with photographer Brita Nilsson. He pays only partial attention as Brita tells him how, after too many years of taking too many pictures of too many kinds of suffering, she focused on taking pictures only of writers, making "a planetary record" of...