To paraphrase the immortal words of Jerry Seinfeld describing his TV show, this book is about nothing. And like the show, it's stylish and funny, a linguistic romp.

The narrator, who gives us only his first initial, X, is a former New York lawyer now overseeing the assets and charity foundations of the wealthy and mysterious Batros family in Dubai. That phantasmagoric emirate, forever under construction, with ever taller and more fanciful buildings, with Guinness records for "the longest driverless metro, the tallest hotel, the largest gold ring … the biggest mall, and … the most nationalities washing their hands at once" is the right place for this fever dream of a novel. It begins in a meditative, seemingly self-aware voice but soon turns into a hectic monologue that seems increasingly absurd and quite possibly delusional.

What the narrator's work consists of is unclear, not least to him; he wads up correspondence and merrily erases e-mails. He stares out the window, relaxes in his fancy massage chair, gets pedicures from his friend Ollie, goes in for deep-sea diving, visits brothels staffed by young Russian women.

He's an obsessive narcissist who worries complex speculations about room theory, problems of linguistic meaning: "a word was … a letter-shaped darkness, which is to say, a kind of verbatim detail of the immovable, possibly entropic, and in any case finally annihilating, residual super-reality of blackness." I think, wow, brilliant, and the next second, what is he talking about?

Whatever he says it's flamboyant poetry, often mixing a high formal style with the demotic; "I sprang out of bed with a madman's idea of a breakthrough: I had been trying to kill, or cage, the rats of complexity. Wrong! Let the revolting [animals] multiply."

He spends a lot of time composing mental e-mails he doesn't send, and fecklessly supervising a surly Batros nephew. He also spends an inordinate amount of time speculating about an acquaintance, Ted Wilson, who has disappeared (and does not reappear) and the matter of his two (concurrent) wives, one of whom seems to dislike our hero, for reasons he can't figure out. He ruminates on his failed relationship with ex-girlfriend Jenn but can't seem to resolve the matter of the acrimonious breakup and who betrayed whom.

Joseph O’Neill

The novel's odd title seems to refer to his sense that when they were together, he was always in the doghouse. In any case, "[s]he wasn't really a great fan of the whole person-to-person Liebe an sich thing, if such a thing actually exists."

After 200 or so pages of his loony but entertaining rants and ruminations, the end, in the form of a dreadful reality he's managed not to recognize, comes at him like a fast train. We shouldn't be surprised, but somehow are. It's been there all along, but X preferred to let sleeping dogs lie.

Brigitte Frase is a book critic in Minneapolis.