An overweight manager who drives his mother to kill herself, then joins a cult. A young and handsome director who hurls himself from a window. A lady lawyer who leaves her job and family for a life of near-prostitution. What have these disparate, desperate souls in common? They are victims of predatory significant others, their lives ruined, in each case, by love. Each once patients of Professor Luc Jamet, each finally incurable, they are united as case studies in his book, Love Kills, a study of the destructive passions unleashed by amorous relations. The final, culminating case study recounts the unhappy psychologist’s own romantic sufferings. Upon completing it, he commits suicide, and the book is posthumously published by his sister Dolores Jamet (a pun on “Pain Nevermore”) and becomes a phenomenon.

Iacub bookends her novel of ideas, whose body takes the guise of Jamet’s treatise, with all manner of playful devices: prefaces to the first and second editions by Dolores, the sick doctor’s sister; a Senator’s appreciation of the book’s cultural phenomenon; accusatory letters to the publisher from “real” people mentioned. Sociology, self-help, pop and professional psychology, postmodern form, philosophical satire, copious footnotes to real and imagined books, even film criticism—all these join forces in a story skewering our society’s tendency to run from our very contemporary freedoms toward refuge in invasive legislation.