For many years Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charles Citrine were the best of friends - Humboldt a grand erratic figure, Charlie a young man of frenzied and noble longings. But by the 1970s Humboldt has died a failure in New York, and Charlie's success-ridden life in Chicago has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life. He has left Charlie something in his will.Now Charlie is middle-aged and a bit shaky and it is high time that his life came to something. His days are cluttered with comic absurdities and his destiny seems obscured. Himself a thinker, he longs to come from left field and knock them all dead, to make intellectuals as clearly superfluous as they seem to him to be. But his ex-wife has him enmeshed in lawsuits; he is held in thrall by the young, sexually beguiling but expensive and unsuitable Renata; he has fallen into the hands of a neurotic Mafioso called Rinaldo Cantabile; and his career seems to have ground to a halt.
How the gentle but resilient Charlie comes to know what he must do and how he triumphs over his ever more ridiculous tribulations is the great discovery of Humboldt's Gift.