A. G. Mojtabai is one of those dolorously polished writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald was another—whose prose has the quality of fractured light, playing over the shards of things: the waning of a romance, the eclipse of a career, the dissolution of a mind. Her first novel, Mundome, was a startlingly lucid evocation of schizophrenia. Mojtabai's second novel, The 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud, recounted the disastrous consequences of an experimental program among a group of high school scientists and evinced, again, an unusual sense of the price that is paid for certain advantages of sensibility.

Her latest novel, A Stopping Place, takes off in another direction altogether. It … focuses upon the theft of a holy Moslem relic. James Nirmal Roy, a retired public servant, is assigned to investigate the incident….

A Stopping Place is about different levels of misunderstanding. It seems to me to take its originating impulse...