"The Lair," a Novel by Norman Manea In "Against Simplification," an essay posted on the Project Syndicate Web site last August, Norman Manea rightly pointed out that in North America literary translation is too rare a practice, arguing that "imported books are thought to be too "complicated," which is another way of saying that literature should deal with simple issues in a simple way, obeying the rules of the mass market, with its tricks of packaging, accessibility, advertisement and comfort." No reader of Manea's novel "The Lair" - first published in Romanian a few years ago and now appearing in English in Yale's laudable Margellos World Republic of Letters series - will accuse him of dealing with easy issues, making concessions to the marketplace or pitching himself to an audience in any way. "The Lair" is conspicuously, self-consciously and at times infuriatingly complex and challenging. Its émigré characters - while charmed by New World "nonsense and good will" and the freedoms of New York City - slam American culture for its ahistoric simplifications, the monetization of all human exchange and what Manea calls "the tyranny of pragmatism." The novel's restless, febrile point of view, zipping across continents and decades, connects three Romanian intellectuals based in the United States, one of whom, an unnamed first-person narrator, appears suddenly a quarter of the way through the book and returns only briefly a few times after. The others are Augustin Gora, who has been in New York since gaining asylum while on a cold-war-era Fulbright scholarship, and Peter Gaspar, the child of Nazi death camp survivors who arrives years later in the company of Gora's estranged wife, one of several phantasmal women haunting the sidelines of the story. In the wake of Gaspar's comically curtailed chauffeuring career, the passenger he has almost killed hires him as a "visiting assistant professor" at a small college. When the man asks Gaspar to review the memoirs of Cosmin Dima (another émigré academic, transparently based on Mircea Eliade), Gaspar reluctantly agrees, though it will mean discussing what Dima's memoirs pointedly avoid: the man's spell as a mystical fascist in Axis-allied Romania. Before Gaspar can finish the review, yet another Romanian expat, a former Dima "disciple" who has distanced himself from the master, is murdered in a campus washroom (as was Eliade's real-life protégé Ioan Culianu). Soon after the review appears, Gaspar receives a cryptic death threat involving a New York Times clipping and a quotation from a Jorge Luis Borges story. Like Gaspar, we're drawn ever deeper into a narrative labyrinth of Balkan complexity as suspects, chiefly female, proliferate and agents of the vast, varied American policing apparatus - campus security, a local cop, a state trooper, an F.B.I. agent - get involved. This summary shortchanges "The Lair." The plot is subordinate, a slender trellis designed to support Manea's densely interlacing digressions, riffs and reveries on everything from utopian idealism and the meaning of 9/11 to death metal music and the art of the obituary. A conventional creative writing teacher would nail him for failing to dramatize enough or to mold fully distinct characters, and while the rap isn't really fair - Manea seems indifferent to the prescriptions of contemporary realism - it's still worth broaching, in part to give a sense of how deeply "The Lair" differs from most of today's English-language fiction. Through much of the book, long blocks of exposition alternate with dense, repetitive dialogues between characters whose voices are so indistinguishable - all marked by an epigrammatic staccato - that their conversations seem more like thinly disguised authorial monologues. When Gaspar is bantering with the student who sorts his mail, he says: "I don't know what goes on in your dorms. Drugs, orgies? I wouldn't be shocked. Youth. The test of limits. I never participated. Regretfully. She replies: "You can make it up. America offers you ways. You modify your look, body, mind, personality, anything. You can find the magic pill or the elixir invented only last week. Steven Heighton's most recent publication is "Workbook," a collection of memos, epigrams and fragmentary essays.