The novel is explicitly set in Bulgaria, but implicitly it is set on the staging ground of intensity itself. These 'little theaters of heat,' these packets of desire or panic or imminence, these doublings-down of doubt and upswellings of confidence-these concentrations of feeling are Greenwell's subject. I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the moment it isn't welcomed, even if that welcome is contrived. And when I asked him what was wrong he just shrugged and answered that he had already had sex that afternoon, which seemed like a breach of contract, though I suppose I had no real basis for complaint.