The Moth for the Star

Reich’s dizzying sixth novel (after The Song My Enemies Sing) burrows into the fractured mind of a man who believes he may have committed murder. The bulk of the action takes place in 1930s New York City, where Charles Varnas is haunted by a trip to Egypt he took five years earlier, during which he may or may not have killed someone. Additional sections are set five years before the Egypt trip, when Charles rendezvoused in Venice with his lover, Campbell. The surreal, deliberately disorienting third-person narration shuffles between real events, gin-induced reveries, and Charles’s half-complete memories as timelines tumble into one another. Slowly, all the disturbing, distorted recollections build to a devastating reveal. Reich delivers more of an atmospheric treatise on memory than a straight-up mystery, and his poetic style effectively conjures place (“Some restraint, she decided, must remain in the mad pavilions of Manhattan”), though it gets overwrought at times (“The infinite melancholy would reach for him from the stars like a mob of brilliant spiders”). Still, mystery readers up for a lyrical experiment may enjoy themselves. (Sept.)