The main characters in Lusts, including [Richard Durgin, widower of poet Rachel Isaacs,] a Chinese-American professor who is writing Isaacs' biography and an American-Indian librarian who marries Durgin on his way downhill, are all unable to belong. Blaise, who attended 25 schools across North America before Grade 9, has turned his highly personal sense of displacement into a graphic metaphor for the experience of modern life in North America.

The novel does have irritating faults. Blaise is careless about chronology and he occasionally lets lively material run on too long. By contrast, he treats a few important characters, notably Jack Toomey, Isaacs' lover in her final year, far too sketchily. But those flaws pale beside Blaise's unobtrusive mastery of form, his eye for memorable detail and his acute, impressionistic sense of the passing of the years…. Furthermore, Blaise is rarely content merely to provide impressions; he often goes on to...