I  have long been an admirer of David Plante's fiction, but when I try to explain his novels to friends, I am met with blank stares. "Yeah, OK," they say, "but what happens in these books?" Well, nothing ... and everything. In Plante's fictional universe, minute attention to overlapping emotions is the driving force. Catharsis and wonder spring from the mundane. What is unseen and unsaid is more important than characters' outward actions.

Best known for his luminous Francoeur Trilogy and the almost hallucinogenic sexuality of his novel, The Catholic, David Plante is an acquired taste. His latest book, The Accident, is typical of his previous work and at the same time excitingly different. It concerns the spiritual struggles of a young man who is spending his junior year abroad at a Belgian Catholic university.

The unnamed narrator finds himself doubting the existence of God and believes the source of his doubt was a trip to Spain he took that summer. In Spain, he says, "the totally Godless clarity" made him see everything in a new way.

Another American student, plump, religious and infuriatingly naive Tom, serves as the narrator's foil. A strange connection forms between them as the narrator repeatedly professes his atheism and Tom tries to "help," to give him some spiritual comfort and guidance. Both young men are drawn to a third American student, spoiled and troubled Karen, and to her affected boyfriend Vincent.

drifting through

The four Americans drift through a semester, their lives intersecting. Karen throws a party when her father visits. Tom and the narrator make a depressing trip to Brussels and get lost. Vincent shows up from time to time and acts aloof. Finally, they all take off on a vacation to Spain, where Tom hopes to help the narrator relive and understand his experience from the previous summer. On the way, an event dramatically alters their lives.

That is the plot. As I've already said, you don't read David Plante for the story. Plante's language is as focused and brilliant as a laser. His amazing way with characters is as strong in The Accident as in any of his previous novels. Few authors could create such an introspective, practically self-loathing, narrator and make him so human and so riveting.

The narrator says early on in the novel, "I was 19, the last year of my adolescence, the first year of my maturity." From that statement, one might assume this will be a standard coming-of-age novel. By the time The Accident reaches its mesmerizing and inevitable climax, however, it becomes clear that Plante has written what could be called a "coming-to-life" story. The narrator is pushed out of his sterile, self-absorbed world into an existence requiring participation and compassion.

Plante has written an odd sort of mystery novel as well. What exactly happened in Spain? How can the narrator's attraction/repulsion to Tom be explained? Plante's ambiguity is masterful. It allows The Accident to be read in many ways and yet offer no answers. What's important is the result of the narrator's experiences.

You have to hand it to Plante for having the guts and talent to write a novel that seriously probes existential and religious issues while maintaining a firm anchor in the emotions of his narrator. I have rarely read a more heartbreaking description of the yearning and loss one feels when confronted with the possibility that there is no God. And that, I think, is the key to Plante's appeal.

At the center of the narrator's introspection, in the midst of all his self-conscious behavior, his disdain for what he sees as Tom's naivete, and his despairing view of God as a "darkness... that spreads out in all directions," is the more mundane need to love and be loved, to hope and wish for the purity, innocence, and grace that everything around you seems to say just isn't possible.