The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil

Graham Caveney hails a literary mystery that matches erudition with excitement

When Freud quipped that the closest thing to paranoia was philosophy, he hinted at the ease with which scholarship can spill over into psychosis. For, while we need to read the world into some kind of order, we can just as easily over-read it into a conspiracy of clues and secret signs.

Nowhere is this state of what he termed "epistemophilia" more in evidence than in the spectral silence of the public library. In its peculiar role of providing open access to private worlds, it both allows and denies us possession of those mysteries that feed our pathology. Libraries make us consumers who lack the power of purchase, bibliophiles doomed to eternal browsing.

What is impressive about Allen Kurzweil's second novel, The Grand Complication, is its ability to take such abstractions and crystallise them into a compelling narrative unashamed of its intellectual credentials, without ever being enslaved to hem. Alexander Short is an American librarian who organises his life with all the anal precision of the Dewey Decimal System. His Manhattan apartment is very much 629.134, while his marriage is probably closer to 577.68. He is a man who appreciates order.

He is befriended by one Henry James Jesson, a collector of books and memorabilia relating to Marie Antoinette. The final piece of his jigsaw is a pocket-watch whose whereabouts are rumoured to be coded in an engraving in a rare volume called "The Book of Hours". Alexander takes the bait, losing himself in a labyrinth of archives, cross-references and arcane authors.

We have, of course, been here before – Eco's murderous illuminated manuscripts, Borges's fictional detection, even Barnes's Flaubertian obsessive. Yet it is to Jesson's forenames that the book owes its greatest debt. Henry James's The Aspern Papers haunts every page, from the erotic tension of the quest (Alexander's love life is radically re-classified) to the Gothic dénouement – which I have no intention of revealing.

Like James, Kurzweil is the master of the word kept back, his plot pivoting on the significant silence and ambiguous vignette. When Alexander discovers that his research is forming the basis for Jesson's novel, we are supplied with another turn of the screw... So it goes on, a Chinese box of a story, books speaking among themselves, fictions of every kind sustaining characters even as they defraud them.

While there are games galore to be sifted and solved, the novel is never in danger of being just a literary crossword. First, it contains some comic set pieces that more than hold their own: the pettiness of library politics; a wonderful character assassination of Dewey's personal and political life; a great pastiche of gangster chic, like Walter Benjamin making a cameo in The Sopranos.

Second, the novel also works strictly as a hi-tech thriller, owing as much to The Maltese Falcon as to The Name of the Rose. The stakes of the game are played for real and, allusions aside, contain the kind of urgent menace found in the best of contemporary crime.

Kurzweil respects his genre and, if he can do postmodernism with a playful smile, is equally capable of neon noir with a poker face. He has produced a meditation on time, a critique of commodity fetishism and an analysis of the monomaniacal mind. What is most impressive is that he has done so while writing a novel. Now that really is clever.