About 10 pages into Wit in Love, I began to feel a vague sense of dread. Prolific playwright and novelist Sky Gilbert’s newest work, an epistolary novella, based on the life of gay philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, begins with a very long-winded diary entry in which Wittgenstein asserts the simple fact that he exists. Later, he elaborates at length about a misunderstanding over which buses come to his habitual stop. And so on.
    Luckily, Wit in Love quickly gets more interesting, exploring the emotional flowering of a hidebound rationalist who finally learns the joys of romance. The story is set in 1938, with Hitler poised to invade Poland and “Wit” teaching philosophy in Cambridge, England. He’s best known among students for his unkempt eyebrows, shabby vestments, and lectures filled with long and inexplicable pauses.
    When he’s not debating cultural relativism with an annoying colleague, Wit meets up with a working-class chap who appreciates the ladies, but has no qualms about homoerotic grappling in public restrooms. Through Wit’s roughhousing with John, a train porter, the author makes sharp observations about both the intransigence of social class and the malleability of sexual identity.
    Until he falls in love with graduate student Arthur, Wit has trouble seeing the world as anything more than a series of logic puzzles. He designs a house for his sister and her family: the walls are sloped, the windows too high to see through. Wit intends the building as a character-builder, where anyone else would see only architectural sadism.
    Gilbert has re-imagined actual people in his work before – most recently in last year’s Brother Dumb, which riffed on J.D. Salinger – and uses these skills to good effect in Wit in Love. With subtle, clever humour, he transforms his narrator’s quirks of character, which initially grate, into traits that endear him to the reader. Wit makes observations that are at once astute and hilarious: “Losing a hat is like death, for death can be so sudden.”
    Wit in Love is unsentimental but unexpectedly moving, showing how even a coldly analytical heart can melt. Maybe there’s hope for intellectuals everywhere, after all.