"Set in late-nineteenth-century Paris, Downstream is the story of civil servant Jean Folantin, a man beset with melancholy induced by middle-aged loneliness, nihilism, and toiling for a wage that scarcely allows him to subsist. His days are composed of office drudgery; in the evenings he searches in vain for a decent meal. His nights are spent alone." Whether Downstream is the political tale of a man's enslavement by poverty or, instead, a psychological tale of his reluctance to genuinely invest hope in anything that actually matters, it is J.K. Huysmans in a foul and visionary mood.