What I wanted to do in telling Dwight’s story is capture the loony, obsessive passions—here, a love for astronomy—we’re capable of at Dwight’s age, passions that push us out to explore the big world. At the same time, I wanted to show the process by which we come to understand that the world is more complicated and troubled than we imagined.

In an era before mass-production, every object a person handled was made by an individual, and thus unique. It had a history, and, sometimes, a destiny. Chairs, weapons, embroidered cloaks, a bronze cheese grater—any of these might appear in Homer with the name of its maker, its place of origin, and the genealogy of who regifted it to whom.

Shaking Teddy’s hand, he knows this week will be long and filled with lasts: Last swim in the lake. Last game of horseshoes on the lawn. Last night on the dock, watching the moon climb, star by star, into the sky.

He will pay for this at Trivia Night if he makes it to the future

(If the future still has trivia, if the future still has night)

and my friend is feeling better, done with chemo,
and I don’t know what to say but can’t shut up,
just keep reloading wrong words through the last
packed aisles and turnstiles, back to Saturday,
appalled, of course, but not ungratified
by all these ways we have to stay alive.

Integration in, say, Germany, with its robust manufacturing economy and a need for workers is one thing. In Greece, which is just beginning to recover from its worst ever recession and still has statistical unemployment of 16 percent, it is quite another.

Here, I thought, is a glimpse of what it’s like to live without evidence of the past

Retail jobs are under relentless threat from Amazon and the like; Wendy’s and its peers have been testing out touch-screen ordering, and it’s not hard to imagine any warm meals prepared by humans soon falling into the artisanal category; and computerization has been eliminating all manner of office work for decades. But people find it hard to believe that most eighteen-wheelers will soon be running on autopilot on highways, with complete automation soon to follow. The notion inspires the specter of runaway juggernauts massacring scores of innocent commuters and vacationers in their Toyotas and Priuses in flaming roadside pileups.

Maybe I’m missing something. Death in Her Hands is a novel about delusions and lacunae, after all, and it’s certainly possible that I’m not as careful a reader as I think I am, but I’ve read this book twice now, and I still don’t have a clear sense of why it was written, much less of what it’s trying to say.