Lenny Abramov is, according to his äppärät, a “heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious, non-Bipartisan” (88) man with high cholesterol and depression inherited from his Russian Jewish parents. As he approaches middle age, Lenny takes his work for Post-Human Services, a growing life-extension company, to travel to luxurious Italy. In Italy, where no one counts carbohydrates or monitors his rapid aging, he falls in love with a Korean-American girl named Eunice Park.

Lenny is a pen-and-paper, book-reading man in a “post-literate” (275) age. He writes his recollections in a diary, even though the smell of books puts off the younger generations, who are tied to their äppäräti. That Lenny lives in a building full of elderly people does not really surprise Eunice Park when she decides to live with him. He wears outmoded clothing and, although he aims to begin dechronification processes as soon as he has the money, seems to remind everyone around him of the slow process of death and decay.

In his devotion, Lenny writes down the goal of loving Eunice as fully as possible. Even as he starts to recognize that their relation may work, he devotes himself to her both romantically and sexually.