Dhalgren is almost beyond description. It is a book about sex, gender, race, class, art and identity. Set in the beleaguered midwestern American town of Bellona, where a disaster which remains unrevealed has struck. The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.