Agnes among the gargoyles is a novel steeped in the lore of New York City. The engine of the novel is the love of the city felt by the book's protagonist, Agnes Travertine, an architectural preservationist. Agnes is the sort of person who spies a dignified sliver of the Woolworth Building behind some formless modern building and thinks of "a line of lace slip showing at the bottom of a gaudy dress." Agnes is painted on a broad social canvas and tackles big themes, the lure of the past and the ultimate failure of nostalgia, the resonance of place, the dangerous mysteries of love and sex.