Through his chief character Dean Albert Corde, Bellow is attacking an even larger problem: the human knowability of truth, and the artifice in our views of history. Corde , a resident of Chicago, travels with his Roumanian wife Minna back to her home country and dying process of her famous mother. Here Crode is afforded a comparison of the decay of communism and the decay of democracy in his tale of two cities. As he hibernates in Bucharest thinking about the grimness of the Eastern bloc, he also mulls over a murder in Chicago, the doomed, black underclass of America, lead poisoning of the planet, the failure of prison reform in Chicago, the distortions of the media, the failure of the modern university, and is overwhelmed by the nightmare of it all.