Alone with You in the Ether

An artist with bipolar disorder and an obsessive mathematician embark on an unconventional romance in this cerebral love story from Blake (The Atlas Six). When Art Institute of Chicago docent Charlotte Regan, who’s in court-ordered psychotherapy following a scheme to counterfeit foreign currency, meets Aldo Damiani, a prickly University of Chicago grad student, their connection is immediate. Aldo urges Regan to agree to six conversations, over the course of which he intends to understand her. With the bemused tolerance of Regan’s boyfriend, the pair grow closer—so close that Regan offers Aldo “one part of me for your consumption.” She expects him to go for sex, but instead he asks for her art, which she hasn’t worked on in years. Spurred on, Regan takes up painting, dumps her boyfriend, quits her medication, and launches a volatile, passionate relationship with Aldo. Blake’s prose is silky and as eccentric as her characters, with an assortment of third-party narrators interrupting the action in “voice-over.” (“THE NARRATOR, A STUDENT WHO HAS JUST ARRIVED: You can never prepare for weathering anything in Chicago.”) The message of finding a richer life off mood stabilizers won’t sit well with all readers, but there’s no denying the characters make for fascinating and complicated studies. This is a book to savor. (Nov.)