MANIC OF THE HOUR Bouillier is neurotic, therefore he is.

Photograph: Gerard Berreby

By Grégoire Bouillier. Translated by Lorin Stein. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.

Like fellow French memoirists Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Michel Leiris, Grégoire Bouillier revisits sad-sack humiliations in a tone that’s at once rattled and highly amiable. The scenes detailed in The Mystery Guest—Bouillier’s second book and his first to be translated into English—find the author heartbroken, aimless, neurotic and poorly dressed. He’s socially awkward, too: At the party that serves as the book’s panic-generating centerpiece, he tells the hostess, whom he’s meeting for the first time, that he’s “currently an expert in the cruelties of existence.” But unlike so many American memoirists who refuse to let go of their melancholic luggage, Bouillier treats ennui as a journey with an end. His sentences might be vessels filled with dread, but they lurch and roam with such hyperkinetic energy that once the author’s burden is lifted, he soars into the stratosphere.

But first he must have his dark night of the soul. The book opens in 1990, on the day that Leiris, a writer The Mystery Guest refers to frequently, dies. Bouillier is spending the Sunday afternoon sleeping in his clothes, overshadowed by a long-dead romance and in general coming off like an emo mascot for bespectacled slackers. Years ago, a girlfriend, who remains nameless, abandoned him without a word of explanation. She calls on the book’s second page to invite him to a birthday party for the artist Sophie Calle, who wants one friend for every year she’s lived, plus an unknown “mystery guest” who will represent the year to come. The ex wants Bouillier to attend in the latter role, and their oddly businesslike conversation, during which she makes no reference to the past, sends the author into manic overdrive. On one page he’s ebullient, and on the next he’s bitter or totally crushed.

Bouillier has a remarkable knack for capturing the unpredictable rhythms of post-breakup despair. There’s something raw and endearingly comic about the way he describes his willfully bad dressing habits and his doomed search for the perfect birthday gift. His anxiety finds its apotheosis in the party scene, one of the most detailed social train wrecks in contemporary letters. But even as this self-described “dime-store Don Quixote” travels to the extremities of disappointment, he gives his book the feel of a carefully constructed novel, complete with a strong voice, unpredictable plot twists and artful pacing. He can stretch a sore-thumb party experience out for 40 pages and condense a breakup (this time with another, less tantalizing woman) into two sentences.

The Mystery Guest is a highly literary book that gives shout-outs to Nabokov, Homer, Joyce, Hervé Guibert and Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian bile-spewer whose tortuous style Bouillier vaguely emulates. It’s also a book of searching, and in his quest for answers, the author draws on literary knowledge to great effect. After his final encounter with his ex, he notes its similarity to a scene from one of her favorite novels, Mrs. Dalloway, and becomes certain that he’s receiving a message—the liberating explanation that he’s spent the majority of the book scrambling for. Like an amped-up code-breaker, he begins forging connections between his life story, Woolf’s novel, Leiris’s writings and a space probe called the Ulysses. He rides the euphoric train of thought right out of his funk.

For a moment, it’s hard to believe that these answers will actually stick (they will certainly give most therapists pause). But Bouillier reassembles his world with such detail and optimism that it’s impossible not to get swept up in his pitch-perfect mash-up of the rational and the madcap. The swift associations also come embedded with a powerful argument that literature can add something crucial to our experience. In this sense, The Mystery Guest resembles Alison Bechdel’s excellent new graphic memoir, Fun Home, another book that cleverly draws on Homer and Joyce as it fleshes out a painful and mystery-laden past. By letting their own experiences mingle with literary works, Bouillier and Bechdel not only add contours to their stories—they discover striking beacons of light.