In the final story of Paul Headrick’s collection, The Doctrine of Affections, he inserts an analysis of his own work in a tale that blends fiction and non-fiction. “I told her I didn’t want to write yet another story that led to the protagonist encountering some unlikely truth teller and then reaching an epiphany in isolation somewhere, with some convenient symbols carrying the weight of the resolution.” But that’s not entirely fair.

The premise of the book is that music is designed to produce a single emotion in the listener. The book is all about music and interpersonal relationships and aims to mimic, or prove, that theory. If this book is to be summed up succinctly, then sadness will do. Or loneliness. Or yearning. Perhaps they’re all the same feeling.

At first, it is difficult to grasp what Headrick is trying to do. Though a strange emotional sense pervades the pages, it takes a while to get into the flow. Once you do, however, you are briskly sucked in. Everything snaps into focus and the words, although wonderfully written, almost stop mattering. It is the emotional arc and feel that carry the weight of this book, not the convenient symbols.

This also isn’t a book for people who enjoy conclusions. Each story comes to an end and a sort of resolution, but not in a traditional sense. There is no happy ending, no riding off into the sunset. Nor is there a gloomy, rain-spattered funeral either. There is an open-endedness that reveals only that the characters will continue living in one way or another when you have stopped imagining their lives.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sensation of listening to a song over and over, perhaps even over the course of years, and then one day it makes sense — the meaning comes into focus. That’s this book. And once it makes sense, it’s a beautiful thing.