Mitchell Zukor

Mitchell is the novel’s central character and protagonist. His age is never explicitly defined, but several factors suggest that he is relatively young. The most significant of those factors is the reference, in narration, to his having moved to New York City from Seattle shortly after his graduation from college, that combines with the reference to his junior status at his first job to suggest that he is somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, more likely the former.

Mitchell’s personality, along with core aspects of his identity, might best be summed up in the phrase “statistics nerd.” The narrator of the prologue-like chapter “Brugada” comments that Mitchell calculates odds for different disaster scenarios for fun and recreation, while the remainder of the narrative makes repeated, and varied, suggestions that Mitchell is both obsessed with, and talented at, calculating variables, risks, and likely outcomes...