The protagonist of Focus, Lawrence Newman, is a quiet man, happy to blend into the background, content to look out on the world from the supposed security of his own privacies. He works for an anti-Semitic company in which his role, in personnel, is to enforce that policy by denying employment to Jews. It is not something he questions but there are few things that he questions. He is a conformist who finds protection, if not meaning, in blending in. His small acts of resistance are so refined as to escape attention by anything but what he takes to be his own exquisitely refined sensibility. He paints his shutters a slightly different shade of green from those of his neighbours, neighbours with whom, for the most part, he abhors to socialise. Indeed, he feels a certain repulsion from personal contact. A single man who lives with his mother, he avoids commitments, accepting prevailing orthodoxies, drifting on the tide of his own disinterest, until suddenly his world begins to collapse and he is forced, literally and symbolically, to see the world anew. He is slowly taken apart and, finally, reconstructed, a new man.

Other races flit across that protagonist's consciousness. They are, though, no more than part of an inchoate city on which some kind of order must be imprinted, and this in a novel in which the city is itself the source of paranoia as people have to endure the forced propinquity of the subway, pressing flesh against alien flesh, and crowds are charged with the potential to transform into mobs.