[Kakutani is a regular reviewer for The New York Times. In the following review of Borderliners, she assesses the novel as "a willfully elliptical narrative that often tries the reader's patience."]

Like Peter Hoeg's last novel, the best-selling Smilla's Sense of Snow, Borderliners is one of those books that functions on two levels. Smilla was both a thriller and a philosophical meditation on the human condition; Borderliners is both a harrowing tale of an orphan's ordeals within the Danish child-care system and a philosophical meditation on the nature of time.

The biggest difference between the two novels—and it is a huge one—has to do with language and tone. Whereas Smilla boasted a marvelously eccentric narrator, who related her story in wry, impatient prose, Borderliners features an evasive and depressed narrator, who cloaks his anxiety in windy, metaphysical asides. The result? Borderliners is a willfully elliptical narrative that often tries the reader's patience.

As a reader gradually discovers, Borderliners is narrated by a man named Peter, who not only shares the author's first name but also says he was adopted by a family named Hoeg when he was 15. The story Peter relates takes place in the 1960's and early 70's, in the years before his adoption.

The fictional Peter tells us that he spent his early years at a series of institutions for orphans: first a home for infants, then a children's home, a reform school and a school for troubled but academically gifted children. The last was known as Crusty House, Peter says, because of the crusts the students "had to make do with instead of proper bread." After he is nearly raped by a teacher there, Peter is transferred, under a special program, to an elite private school, Biehl's Academy.

The portrait Peter draws of Biehl's makes the school seem like a miniature police state: children are monitored day and night by a strict and unforgiving staff, and transgressions are punished with reprimands, blows and beatings. Peter soon begins to suspect that there is a secret "plan" behind the school's strict regimen, a plan he determines to expose.

In the course of his troubled tenure at Biehl's, Peter manages to make two friends he will treasure for the rest of his life: Katarina, a beautiful girl with whom he promptly falls in love, and August, a psychotic boy whom he adopts as a kind of son. In retrospect, Peter observes, his love for Katarina and August has taught him the meaning of family and responsibility; it has given him hope and the will to live.

With the help of Katarina and August, Peter begins to conduct an investigation of the school. He suggests, in portentous asides to the reader, that some sort of Darwinian experiment is being conducted with the students. As evidence, he cites some disturbing incidents: a student's attempt to cut off his own tongue, the administration of sedatives to August, the concealment of student records.

Although Mr. Hoeg is intermittently able to use such incidents to orchestrate a sense of narrative tension, one later learns that many of them are little more than deliberately placed red herrings, a realization that leaves the reader with a vague sense of dissatisfaction.

To make matters worse, Peter embroiders his story with stilted and pretentious musings about the nature of time. "What is time?" he asks near the beginning of the novel. "I shall have to try to say, but not yet. It is too overwhelming for that. You have to begin more simply. What does it mean—to measure time? What is a timepiece?" And later: "To sense time, to speak about time, you have to sense that something has changed. And you have to sense that within or behind this change there is also something that was present before. The perception of time is the inexplicable union in the consciousness of change and constancy."

These highly abstract soliloquies are apparently meant to add resonance to Peter's story, and to underscore one of the novel's central themes concerning the dehumanizing effects of science and the scientific method. Unfortunately they have another effect entirely: they weigh the story down, turning what might have been a deeply affecting story about a young boy's painful coming of age into a lugubrious and strangely impersonal allegory.