Diane Schoemperlen is the author of one of the best collections of short stories ever published in Canada, 1998’s Forms of Devotion. Winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 1998, the book was funny, wise, and extremely original. Remembering the pleasure I had in reading it, I had high expectations when I picked up Schoemperlen’s new novel, At a Loss for Words.

I was disappointed at first, I must admit. The book’s unnamed narrator is a writer with insomnia, writer’s block, and a lover who has done her wrong. Her self-centredness seems boundless, and the gooey exchanges between her and her man seem too good to be true. But that’s the point, I realized at around page 15. Schoemperlen has written a book as wry as her earlier fiction, and as subtly constructed as Forms of Devotion was innovative.

The story is simple: 30 years after her lover abandoned her to follow his fortune, the narrator encounters him at a reading she is giving. He’s been following her career, has all her books, and couldn’t resist dropping by to meet her again, he says. One thing leads to another and soon they are as deeply in love as they were when she was still in high school and he was beginning to climb the corporate ladder.

They communicate mostly by e-mail, messages that the narrator prints out, the better to savour them. At the beginning they are saccharine, but soon Schoemperlen shows us that things are not what they seem. “Sometimes I wish I could just put you back in the box where I used to keep you,” the narrator writes her lover. “But I can’t seem to manage it. I guess I’m going to have to cut off your legs to fit you back in there.”

There are many laughs in At a Loss for Words that have tears underneath. This a book for those who love words, particularly those who have also loved a person in vain.