A novel about a woman writing a novel about a woman who writes — The Rejection of the Progress of Love is a sexy, earthy, bracingly intelligent examination of the vicissitudes of grief, ambition, aging, information overload, compassion fatigue, and a data-centric understanding of self; the relative merits of giving up or giving in; the seductive myth of progress; and the condition of being a thinking and feeling (gendered, raced) inhabitant of an unthinkable, numbing world.

From Brooklyn to Madison to Ethiopia, Eleanor's slow trek toward a kind of autonomy after her laptop (and her data) are stolen, and the narrator's struggle for authority as she wrestles with her novel and a very famous critic's opinion of it, form a series of intersections of experience, exposure, and self-knowledge, occuring on axes of both will and happenstance: not just the backdrop but the material of the work at hand.