John Knowles has written a beautiful, funny, moving novel about a young man in trouble. If "The Paragon" is flawed—and I think it is—the cracks may shorten its life but they won't seriously impair the pleasure of reading it. Knowles, who got his medals for "A Separate Peace," is an intelligent man telling us things we need to know about ourselves. He tells them well.

The title is important. It's not "A Paragon." It's "The Paragon." And Knowles's model or pattern of perfection for youth and manhood is a seeking, nonconforming, erratically brilliant and socially maladjusted college student. For Knowles the perfect model must be less than perfect. Not an irony. A moral position.

"I think readers should work more … a novel should be an experience," Knowles once said in the pages of this review. Experiencing the character of Lou Colfax, Knowles's paragon human being, is the joy and trial of the novel. Lou's screwy behavior is also muddy. No matter how hard we work beside Knowles, we can't see clearly to the depths of Lou Colfax….

The important episodes in the novel—important in exploring the character of Knowles's confused paragon, important for lovely language—have to do with Lou's relationship with his relatives, and with Lou's love affair with Charlotte, an English actress.

Knowles commands language to feel. This is Charlotte the night she thinks she is conceiving Lou's child: "She felt this act between them as wondrously new, limitlessly meaningful and so as though carried out in slow motion, that all its profound movements and their meanings and clamoring excitements might be clear, its stages so fully expressed that they could be carved in stone for—yes, for future generations…. She slept as though wrapped in soft gauze, layer on layer."

Lou's mother dies. His father suffers a debilitating stroke. They've been bad for his psyche. Lou's other relatives—a cheap politician, a bad actress, a stupid minister—have left scars on him. But Knowles can't make us—me, at least—sense the consequences of these scars because he doesn't show scars happening. In Knowles's imagination Lou's awful childhood somehow prevents his giving Charlotte a child and leads to his mad kidnapping of her baby after she has married. I don't think Knowles knows how Lou got the way he is—and he may not especially care. The family business is melodramatic scenery. What Knowles does care about is the richness of Lou's bizarre personality and his dilemmas of commitment.

Here lies the present relevancy of "The Paragon." Knowles shows us a young man confused by choice. The choices are real: to love and fulfill love or to run from its risks; to kick a no-good past or to live programmed for catastrophe; to play with knowledge or to convert it to effect; to be Lou Colfax or someone society requires.

Lou makes his choices. They come out a draw. We believe him. We recognize his state because it's our own. A magnificent fiction would show all the tendrils leading to Lou Colfax's condition. An intelligent novel would make Lou's condition credible. "The Paragon" is intelligent.