THE PUBLISHERS of David Schmahmann's new novel, "The Double Life of Alfred Buber," have really done him a bit of a disservice with the jacket blurbs for the novel.

They quote author Arthur Golden as saying Alfred Buber shares some characteristics with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. I'm certain it is flattering to Schmahmann on some level, but to offer a comparison to "Lolita," often said to be the greatest novel ever written in English, is daunting for any novel.

So let's get the Nabokov and T.S. Eliot comparisons out of the way and take "The Double Life of Alfred Buber" on its own merits: It's a very good book. Schmahmann has created a very memorable figure in Alfred Buber.

Buber's family sends him to America from his native Rhodesia without so much as a visa. The teenage Buber eventually gains entrance to the country and finds a small room with his uncle Nigel. Buber becomes a fastidious student in America and eventually becomes an attorney living in Boston. He has, against exceptionally long odds, made himself into a well-respected man, but we know things are not quite as they seem.

Buber is lonely. He has all the trappings of success, with the big house and the new Mercedes, but he has never established his social footing and is viewed by most as a competent student or attorney who is rather strange.

One day at the office he overhears one of the partners talking of a land where the women literally kneel at your feet and perform outrageous acts for a mere pittance. Buber, under the pretense of going to Paris on vacation, travels to Bangkok and falls, he thinks, in love.

Bringing an Asian prostitute back to Boston, though, involves many complications, including the purchasing of the girl from her father.

"I sit on the crooked teak platform and I cannot be sitting here, cannot; it is impossible that I have brought about this ridiculous collision of lives and images and expectations, this juxtaposition so immense that it cannot be happening even as I steal glances at the young woman whom I have placed at the center of this hubbub, the soft and perfect product of these cawing peasants."

There is a pathos in Alfred Buber that the reader finds compelling. And up until the very end, Schmahmann gives hope that he might find love--that in spite of all the obstacles and a life of emptiness, Buber can be fulfilled.

Here, at last, one can look to Nabokov and Eliot and get a glimpse of the inevitable end.

Drew Gallagher is a freelance reviewer in Spotsylvania.