In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain - sketches for stories, accounts of his affairs, ideas for movies, and obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age. But now he has found a story he thinks may be he his next novel: the large brass cross behind the altar of St. Timothy's, a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has disappeared...and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, on the Upper West Side. The church's maverick rector and the young woman rabbi who leads the synagogue are trying to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why. Having befriended them, the novelist finds that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. Into his workbook go his taped interviews, insights, preliminary drafts...and as he joins the clerics in pursuit of mystery, it broadens what proves to be a quest for an authentic spirituality at the end of this tortured century.Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, and filled with the insights and sounds of New York, this dazzlingly inventive, mordantly funny masterwork emerges as the American story listeners have been thirsting for: a defining testament of this time, a narrative of the twentieth century written for the twenty-first.