[Since The Hair of Harold Roux] is about an academic in an ivory tower who is also a would-be novelist with writer's block, I ought to have found it the dreariest novel I had ever read. But I didn't. It is full of surprises. Aaron Benham, professor of English, married and moderately successful, has reached the run-in to middle age, and finds his life sterile. His escapes are tonning around on his Honda and remembering his youth, about which he plans a novel. He has the title—'The Hair of Harold Roux'—but cannot find the words.

And so he simply dreams about it…. Why are [his] memories so crucial? Well, because he had potential: with its beckoning future, so much cosier than exposed maturity! But potential to do what? Even in his youth, there is an essential hollowness about Aaron. And here is the novel's flaw. Unlike...