We start with guilt, because I had intentions of taking these things I’m about to tell you and polishing them into professional shapes and sending them into the world through a proper conduit, a gate with a keeper, a lit blog at least. I intended to pitch this story over the walls of my nut house like the good little squirrel I am, but truth be told, dear reader, I spend so much time trying to make professional shapes that will fit through other people’s gates, I needed a respite. And this story happened to come along.

Let me tell you another story first: I once saw a man with his remaindered books. They were in three cardboard boxes that had been unsealed and they were all that was left. The phone had rung; it was official. These books would be more valuable as pulp than as books. It was like having a dead body in the room. I understood the rules, but I still wanted to drape a sheet over those gaping boxes, or close them, or bury them. Books are meant to be the permanent ones, aren’t they? The things that will become archaic yet outlive us and our blogs. For me and perhaps for you books are anchors in time and space and memory — not the idea of books, not the stories within them or stories about them, I mean the books themselves, the tangible things.

The problem with tangible things, of course, is that they are subject to the laws of economics. Costs must be calculated against benefits and that means the bill from the warehouse vs. the revenue projections. I can accept this. Actually, I embrace this, most of the time. The laws of supply and demand will outlive us and our blogs and our books, and the system has its ways of working, however strange it seems. Like democracy (and like me) (and you too) the system is flawed and noble, full of hope and probably, ultimately, hopeless. It helps me sleep at night.

Back to the story.

I found out about this book called YOU or the Invention of Memory just last month, even though the copyright date is 2007. The book’s story is this: the book was published and then its small publisher “folded,” is the word that gets used, and what a pleasant but inaccurate thing to think of a small publisher being turned corner to corner, in half then again, and tucked away in a cedar chest. Really, though, what got tucked away was this book. Fell through the cracks! Dustbin of history! Crammed under some old towels in the cedar chest of forgetting! Tough break, man. Too bad you spent all those months writing that book that no one will ever read. Cue nagging grief, two years.

At which point the book’s author picked himself up and did what any right-thinking artist these days does: he emailed a publicist. Not just any publicist, either, but the smart and discerning Lauren Cerand, whose work I have admired for quite some time. [She is one of perhaps five publicists about whom I can make that statement.] This touched off a classic “girl meets book” plotline, followed by a “new publicity campaign” denoument, or should I say exposition? Rising action?

In order to help the author character tell the book’s story, the book publicist character began mailing copies of the book, for free, to anyone who sent an email requesting one. I heard about this offer on Twitter, in a sentence that must have contained fewer than 140 characters. I sent an email with my address information, and after a brief interlude in which the United States Post Office forgot the way to Maine, a copy of YOU arrived on my doorstep.

I opened the envelope and turned the book, which is pleasantly slim, over in my left hand. The NYTBR blurb on the back jacket refers to the author’s previous collection as “more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer.” In this context the word “underappreciated” is meant to convey both the quality of the author’s work and the quality of the NYTBR, for recognizing the quality of the author’s work when few others did. Perhaps also the quality of you, for the discerning taste that led you to hold this underappreciated thing in your left hand. Pats on the back all around.

(A pause for honesty. I am not well-versed in modern fiction. I lack the, ahh, the critical faculties. Left to my own devices I tend to read nonfiction about manufacturing and/or political intrigue. I become impatient with books about Love & Relationships unless there is also a good description of a factory strike or a corrupt governor or a boss with bad intentions. The author of YOU is the father of a filmmaker whose films I don’t like except this one.)

But this is a rare moment, an adventure! An owl, if you will, on my windowsill!

Cast in the role of reader, the reader character reads, and fortunately for the heroes — all of them — the book is good, funny and sad and gentle in its awareness of itself and the tricks it is playing. It is also, despite some shifts in setting, wholly steeped in New York. Listen:

I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every art work.

It is a sentence that would not apply in Boston, thinks the reader, who is now 70 pages in and feeling grateful for the experience. Not because YOU is the best book the reader has ever read — but then what is? — but because it is miserable and happy at the same time, a reflection on the twin ruts of longing and ambivalence. And also because it entered the story at just the right time and in just the right way, despite the system’s forces, a small reminder that a line is the shortest distance between two faces.