"Red Shift" is a stranger than strange composite novel blending illusion and reality in a peculiar technique. Three stories are superimposed in a time-spliced, tension-packed package dealing with lovers and lunacy in what well may rival the mystery of a [Samuel] Beckett tour de force.

If a novel is supposed to be news about people, the news is garbled. The plot lines are as jagged as a flash of lightning in the distance and as illuminating. The nomenclature confuses too. The story goes back and forth among three men in three different periods of time. The most easily understood segment of the story is the twentieth-century Tom…. Tom is in love with Jan, who has had an affair with another man before meeting Tom—but this is a true love with as rough a terrain to cross as star-crossed lovers ever crossed.

Another story interwined, and by no...