Clark Blaise was well-established as a short-story writer before he published a novel. Brevity suits him; and his new novel is actually a novella, consisting of a prologue, an epilogue, and eight brief stories, two of them narrated in the first person. After two readings, I find it hard to define just what it's about. Yet I can say confidently that it's Blaise's finest work so far.
The central figure, Gerald Lander, is probably the least autobiographical in Blaise's fiction, being a Brooklyn Jew. When we first meet him he is a clinical psychologist aged nearly fifty, lying in bed beside his sleeping wife. In his dreams he sees innumerable faces of people he doesn't know. That has been happening to him for a year. But this time in the climax of his dream he meets his doppelganger. The significance of this will become clear in the climax of the book itself.
Lander's mother has Alzheimer's, and by listening to what she says he develops a theory of language. Precisely what this is is never specified in Blaise's book, but Lander's book on it is a surprise bestseller, and he becomes a celebrated psycholinguist on the international conference circuit.
Lander and his wife have two children. The first, adopted after two miscarriages, was a black girl abandoned by her mother in a dumpster, with heroin in her blood and a finger missing from frostbite. She grows up brilliant and difficult. When Lander visits her in Poland, she is living with a Polish woman and has adopted the name Tewfiqa Niggadyke. She asks him to claim on her behalf the Berlin apartment of his great-uncle, under the German policy of compensating the families of victims of the Holocaust. He agrees to this somewhat outrageous proposal on condition that she revert to being Rachel Lander.
Five years after adopting Rachel, the Landers had a natural child, a boy. Blaise describes the joy of being a parent of a bright and lively child better than I have ever seen it done before:
"This little boy of ours was an unfailing delight.. I loved him without limit or reservation. I woke him up if I came home late, I put him on my shoulders when we shopped.. I thrilled to his perfect little body running, always running, through the apartment. I wanted him running, eternally."
We are told this in the context of Lander's search for his son in Japan, where he has become a Buddhist monk, and evidently belonged for a time to the cult that gassed the Tokyo subway. His father finds him in the north of Japan, working in a squid plant, lame and never speaking.
Once, if Lander had "defined himself in terms of descending value he'd have said: husband, father, researcher, citizen." Now he is divorced, his children are strangers, and he is a world celebrity. We see him in country after country, finally in Israel, where forty years before he spent a summer on a kibbutz. Then one night a car-bomb explodes in front of his hotel in Tel Aviv. Is he killed? The world never finds out for sure.
I still can't say with certainty what this little book is about, but I am certain that it's Blaise's masterpiece, and that I'll return to it often.

 I. M. Owen is a Toronto writer and editor.