Love's Mansion is either Paul West's consummate novel or his most atypical—if, come to think of it, a "typical" Paul West novel can be imagined. Prolific, protean in impersonation, gamy and yet uncannily tender in sensibility and subject matter, he relishes inhabiting "real" historical people we thought we knew, as well as many we didn't, as some of his titles indicate: Lord Byron's Doctor, The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper.

In last year's tour de force, Portable People, there spring to amazing life and sometimes grim death 85 personages from Nixon in China, Simone Weil and the author himself to Rudolf Schwarzkogler, "sonneteer of meat"—his own, an Austrian avant-gardist who in 1940 sculpted himself away from himself, the "patron saint of minimalists" who used razor blades on his own body as a way of "beseeching us to stick together or else."

A biographical note at the end of Love's Mansion says that the author is "at work on a nonfiction book about living with illness," so perhaps what West said of John Keats in Portable People applies to West himself: "He is the perfect image of the compulsive maker who, burning away with a sickness he could not defeat, exploited it for his own purposes. Increasingly consumed, he consumed life itself." Similarly, in Love's Mansion West's thinly fictionalized "parents had come into the world to use life a lot, not to make a little glancing contact, and, as such, were bulk users, helping themselves with both hands in spite of vicissitudes and injuries, until they had had enough, and cried bravely aloud for a full stop."

In Love's Mansion West takes on the supreme challenge of inhabiting those historic, even mythic, personages most important to each of us, our parents, whom we never quite outlive or outgrow or really comprehend; and in his hands they become as astonishing as his other "real" subjects. On the one hand, they are ordinary people with a touch of the grotesque, the heroic and the transcendent; on the other, they are heroic figures who remain transcendent despite their feet of clay.

Hilly and Harry Moxon, born in the "Byron-D.H. Lawrence country"—tough northern land of mines and moors—begin life heroically named Hildreth Fitzalan, on her part, and Hereward on his, "after Hereward the Wake, who defended the Fen country against Norman invaders." But, village-wise, they are soon cut down to a size they rebel against all their lives.

She, petit-bourgeoise daughter of a rich butcher, is very likely a concert pianist and composer of genius who fails a Royal Academy exam in London out of pure cussedness by playing her pieces brilliantly but out of sequence, instinctively rebelling against arbitrary authority; he, like Lawrence a miner's son, passes the crucial essay test for grammar-school entrance that would raise his status but can't afford the school's requisite blazer, tie and cap, and so reads and dreams of military glory, becoming early in life at an inferior school the "superfluous boy, a nuisance man" he would be all his days.

All this is being recollected in agitation by their son, the novelist Clive, at age 55, as he feels his way into the early lives of his dead father and live mother, still vital and challenging at 94. She amazes him during a visit to her nursing home with a rousing version of King Porter Stomp a la Jelly Roll Morton—music he thought she'd always said was "not music"—thus changing his novelist's re-imagination of her within days of her death.

Lying about his age to enter the Great War, Harry becomes at 15 a machine-gunner with a reputation for killing thousands of the enemy and at least three of his own officers, the first part true and the second part mostly a macabre myth manufactured by circumstances. It was customary for a subaltern to take a newly minted sergeant out on night patrol in noman's-land to draw a little fire and see enough action—"with a lot of bangs, eh, and some blood splashed about," as young Lt. Clive Hastilow puts it—for the officer to recommend a decoration for his sergeant's bravery.

Instead, Harry drags back the dead Hastilow, hit in the back of the head by a random rifle shot. His second officer-patron drowns in a shell-hole, after which a major decides Harry is "some type of anarchist feller having his own private war in the middle of the Great one" and is killed by Harry in self-defense on the mission that is meant to trap him.

This Westian comic interlude—"'He's wiped out half my staff,' the colonel whined"—occurs amidst the most barbaric atrocities against civilians by both sides, and ends with Harry being half-blinded by a random artillery round and, at age 16, introduced to oral sex by a lascivious Belgian nurse named Sister Binche, an "angel of satiety" whose nightly ministrations ruin Harry for the blander Hilly when at last, in 1928, they fulfill the troth they plighted decades before as children.

Both of them know it's a misalliance, each having "made a new demand of life" that excludes the other without having the resources to enforce it. Harry is an existentialist before his time, wanting nothing better than a life of continental vagrancy and sensuality; Hilly wanting a life in art, as Clive their novelist son, (named for Harry's first slain officer), sees things from half a century later: "Clive writhed, loving his father as a young man, wanting to kill those who had killed him without killing him."

For a while Clive the viewer disappears, "doomed by powers beyond his control to take a back seat, so as to have a preamble to his own birth, lest he interrupt it in a bout of irascible fellow-feeling predicated upon the trashing of his father," who most intensely does not want a child. Hilly, however, having reached her creative limits by teaching piano to keep them alive when Harry is laid off in the Depression, puts all her artistic eggs in the basket of conceiving the artist Clive would become.

Clive, once born, tells us that this tempestuous failed marriage is largely his fault: "Had they at this point decided against children, they might have thrived," but, as conventional people, "both Hilly and Harry felt their lives being designed by conspicuous failures in the shops, the pubs, and at the bus stops," where they are told that children are their raison d'etre.

Here, it seems, West gives us a perhaps inadvertent glimpse into the sources of his own creativity, the compulsion to keep creating new beings to inhabit in order to maintain his own sense of existence, since he came so close to not being born. (He has even gone so far as to "revise" lives that are known—for example, implicating the Victorian painter Walter Sickert in the murders of Jack the Ripper.) The reader is impressed both by the vividness of the life rendered and the eerie feeling that it is being lived on the page, as necessary as breath to its author.

By whatever means, West the author also constantly impresses us with his gravely cheerful acceptance of mortality, as in the remarkable scene where Harry and Clive find the hanged body of a man whom his father had bested in a dispute only a few days earlier. And in Love's Mansion he seems to have gratefully tracked his talent to its source in this fully imagined valentine to his tumultuously romantic, disappointed but somehow fulfilled mother, who went on "manufacturing the life she had made up" until her death, which closes the book:

"By Monday she had died in her sleep and been revived with paddles long enough to whisper … 'I think I'm dying, I'm sorry,' as if unable to quell some final cosmic prejudice, and Clive knew he was not in her class at all."