The narrator of each love story is not a hero or an antihero, but one of us; flawed, ambivalent, obsessive, trying to make it through the day, through his relations, with some poise. He is poignantly immersed in a pilgrimage not only to come to understand his own nature and the nature of his fixations, but the immense, unstable space between, a byzantine riddle. Communion seems impossible; to be struck dumb is often his only response.

"Being inside John Mandel's brain is an intoxicating experience, similar to a Dostoyevsky Notes From Underground encounter or something closer to...