Raymond and Hannah By Stephen Marche Harvest, 209 pp. $14 Buy this book VLS · Spring 2005 On the Trail of a Curious Young Author Historians Remember the Author of 'The Rape of Nanking' W.G. Sebald, Literature's Tupac Shakur Giving the Legendary Lovecraft a New Platform A Field Guide to Genetic Engineering and Bodily Enhancement The New Poetry Celebrity Translation Made Sensible The Harry With Trouble Fable Talk VLS Bestsellers List more vls most popular most commented Corporate Blanding by Rachel Aviv Ad Infinitum by Paul Collins The New Poetry Demolition Man by Angela Starita The Moviegoer by Joshua Cohen Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

The affair is glib and systematic, propelled by Raymond's hyper-academic understanding of romance. A Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, he studies Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a sprawling 17th-century treatise on love and its "symptoms," "cause," and "cure." Raymond holds his relationship to purely literary standards as he sits for days in his library cubicle, writing about "irrelevant subjects for irrelevant readers. Blah." A fine student, he dutifully fulfills Burton's definition of proper passion—"always good, amiable, fair, gracious, and pleasant."

First novels about young, giddy couples, like Roth's Goodbye, Columbus or Amis's The Rachel Papers, tend to flaunt their neurotic details—pimples, misfired jokes, spaz attacks—but Marche's love story is so aware it's a love story that cavalier notes on the sides of each page prod the process along. "A scene." "Another scene." "In the dark, in the garden." "Conversation over pita, hummus, tabbouleh and fried tomato." With gaping margins, the book eases forward in one fluid rush. Hannah and Raymond have no family, few friends, and a limitless capacity for reading and being awesome in bed.

When Hannah moves to Jerusalem so she can study the Torah and "grow Jewishly," Raymond comfortably conducts the affair from a library research computer, applying his honed skills for rehashing old material and sending e-mails with subject headings like "re: re: re: re: Funny experience." Filled with excess verbiage, their relationship, a "memory with Internet words mixed in," narrows into an extended conversation about what they are studying (the Torah and Burton both prove equally hypocritical and life defining). They argue over their self-proclaimed "holy" texts, trying to find—with typical academic flair—some sort of "hemi-demi-semi-reconciliation."