A poet with no name and a tenuous grasp on reality wanders into a post-apocalyptic town, searching for purpose and meaning. That's as general a summary as I can get, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. Did I even like this book? I'm not sure. I certainly found it interesting, but Dhalgrenis a strange book, and the setting and characters come in at odd angles. 
 The main character (who comes to be known as Kidd or The Kid) almost seems to effect the physical world around him. The city around him exists in an extremely uncertain space that feels outside of time and laws of physics and seems to mirror his uncertain psychological state. Dates never match up, whether by the shifting whim of the man who writes the only newspaper in town, or in the simple things around- a microwave is treated as a fantastic new thing while people walk the street ensconced in giant holograms and an astronaut has drinks at the bar. Kidd knows his birth date but another character born earlier is older. Fires ravage whole streets seemingly at random. A second moon appears in the sky. The sun gets large enough to fill the sky, but nothing gets hotter, and then it goes away again. 
 Delany is definitely making a lot of social commentary in this, particularly about societal norms of class, gender, sex and race, though i never felt like i was being lectured at or that he was putting forward any particular solutions. In Dhalgren's ambiguous post apocalyptic setting, people act like people living without supervision. They get scared, they create a little havoc, they create social groups or isolate. They have a lot of sex. 
 YMMV, but a large amount the sex in the book made me uncomfortable. Most of it is a threesome between two twenty-somethings and a fifteen year old boy,which is...troubling. There's also a group sex scene where consent is questionable at best that I found really uncomfortable to read. 
 While trying to sympathize with Kidd, I kept getting caught up by the fact that he's not a very likeable guy, and likewise I had trouble relating to any of the other characters in the book. Characters in Dhalgren never quite coalesce into traditional characters in the same way that the book asks questions that never quite get answered. A character starts a school, but we don't know why or what kids are there (or if they're there at all) while at the same time Kidd cracks open a box in a warehouse that gives him more questions than answers about things he assumed he'd been hallucinating. In the second half of the book, any semblance of plot seems to dissolve altogether. 
 This is a novel that resists the traditional form of the novel, and the structure of it is fascinating. Is that enough reason to read an 800 page novel? Maybe. I'm glad I read it, and can see myself reading it again sometime in the future. But like...in a few years. Dang this thing was a beast to get through.