[Devotion] is the first novel of a highly literary and self-conscious young man. The reader's heart sinks. But, after all, so was Goethe's Werther…. It begins and ends in the real world of the third person; the centre is a passage through a hell of first-person introspection. From regressive flight inwards, it turns into a solitary's dialogue with a missing partner and into (almost) independent essays and reflections. Some of these last—on Kleist and the historicity of sensibility and moral values, for example—are actually interesting in themselves and not merely because they are part of a novelist's demonstration of though freeing itself from subjective obsession. But that is part of the strategy. It is a very clever novel.

Delicate, intelligent, sometimes even humorous, with more variation than this summary would suggest, Devotion is a surprising throw-back to earlier German literary models of inner sensibility…. In some...