It’s not about the Third World sex trade. It’s not about occidental exploitation. It’s not about buying a Thai wife. It’s not an Asian Lolita. It’s not about generational divides. It’s not about age-defiant sex. It’s not about shame. It’s not about the blight of social stigma. It’s not about convention and bienséance. It’s not even about love really.

The Double Life of Alfred Buber has more to do with loneliness and the very human search for contact and proximity, what is asked of the skin, of the body’s senses. Such a premise would be fairly innocuous and wouldn’t warrant much in the way of narration were it not set in the portly, balding, middle-aged and unassuming frame of Alfred Buber. A self-professed “grotesque little Micawber” hairless of leg and beady of eye. The perfect anti-hero. The prince most uncharming. The Don Juan with no mojo.

We understand from the start that his story is a confession to a distant someone, probably a child he conceived and whose birth and life he has been unaware of until quite recently. We guess at the fact that his one-way romance with an obliging Bangkok bargirl and whose sordid details he seems intent on divulging will end badly. That his life will unravel but not so much as to leave too large a hole. That he will take it all in with a dispassionate sort of elegance, this wretched aristocrat of sentiment, and that not much will have changed from incipit to denouement.

We guess at all of this and are proved mostly right along the way. The interest of the tale told lies not in the twists and turns of the plot but in the way that it is told. The narrator, for all of his prickling lack of appeal ends up being rather endearing. The flat, self-disparaging, very Anglo-Saxon tone with which he chronicles his descent from stalwart reliability to love-stricken mollification and ridicule makes the whole affair even more touching. Buber confesses quickly — in just under 200 pages — and the impending scandal of his double life being revealed demands it.

The scandal itself seems slight, a tabloid farce, embarrassing but not lethal — afterall, what man hasn’t desired and even indulged his want for something younger, firmer and more exotic and gotten a bit derailed because of it? Error, crime, adultery therein lie the only things that make man interesting (Raymond Queneau). The writing switches back and forth between the factual and the fictional. What does one make of the imagined sequences of the Buber? Juxtaposed with the real, they are just as poignantly trite, sedately human, but they lend gauche adolescent hilarity to his blind groping at connective affection. David Schmahmann delivers a touching everyman story with erudite chic and understanding. “Oh it is not love, I know that. It is much more compelling. I do not know where it will lead and yet, and yet, it will lead where it leads. I am a man. She is a woman. Someday we will both be dead.” All is said.