Big Things in Tight Spaces is a picaresque novel on sex and pornography, marijuana, lying, stress, dancing, Africa, Amsterdam, King David, sick bowels, Hank Aaron, American politics, urban trees, and Crazy Horse. The book is about a relentlessly ambitious character trying to fit everything that interests and excites him into a space that doesn't allow for its bulk. At the emotional center of the story is a marriage that keeps shifting over time in reaction to the character's whims and adventures. Fire, the protagonist, wants his marriage to be open, but he thinks he can be faithful at the same time. He refers to it as "a new paradigm of marriage." The hero is earnestly greedy. The writing style is an attempt to fuse the psychological nuance of Saul Bellow with the narrative speed of Elmore Leonard, but in its own rhythmic way, the beat of the sentences switching from 4/4 to 3/4 to 5/4, depending upon the mood of the moment.