A fictional narrator writes notes on the "authors of the No", people suffering from what he names "Bartleby syndrome" in honor of Herman Melville's story Bartleby the Scrivener. The narrator explores authors who decide to stop writing.

I feel really ignorant after the extreme name-dropping that was this "novel". It reads more like a paper than anything with a story. There are some interesting things I learned, but overall, not having read most of the authors discussed, I feel like a lot of the depth of meaning is lost on me.