After a fluke tornado destroys George I. Newett's neighborhood, a series of strange coincidences relating to the stock market crash of 1929 occur, causing him to experience five serial visions corresponding to pivotal events in his life.

"Seven hard-won months into her sobriety, sociology professor Maris Heilman has her first blackout. She chalks it up to exhaustion, though she fears that her husband and daughter will suspect she's drinking again. Whatever their cause, the glitches start becoming more frequent. Sometimes minutes, sometimes longer, but always leaving Maris with the same disorienting question: Where have I been? Then another blackout lands Maris in the ER, where she...

"Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle "Entering the Madness of Others" and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idees fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name-Mr Herman Melvill-is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs...