THOUGHTS ARE NOT linear. They pool up and then they flow out, sometimes catastrophically. Four years ago, I studied at Lancaster University, located in the north of England. The architecture was modernist and cold. The rain was constant. Mud oozed up from between the concrete slabs of the sidewalks. I spent much of my time sitting in my room, staring at photographs of an ex-girlfriend. I longed, completely and perfectly, for her to rise up from between the concrete slabs of my obsession so I could touch her face with my fingertips. The strength of my concentration burned out certain rods and cones in my eyes. When I looked away, her silhouette lingered as a negative, a phantom, her pale skin now blue.

A knock sounded at my door. A Canadian friend stood at the threshold, her boyish face flushed, her sandy hair limp and greasy. Her eyes were glazed and her lips were bitten raw. She'd been up all night. My ex-girlfriend's face transposed itself selfishly upon this unwary Canadian. She had a book in her hands and told me I had to read it. She said it was wonderful. Gorgeous. She had just finished it, and, still caught in its spell, immediately brought it over to me. Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley.

I sat down on my bed, in my shoebox room, the rain grazing my only window, and opened the cover. First published in 1990 and winner of the Whitbread Award, Hopeful Monsters is an experimental love story of the strongest sort and is the last in a series of interrelated novels. Known as the Catastrophe Practice Series, the other books are Catastrophe Practice, Imago Bird, Serpent, and Judith, all of which are currently being reprinted by Dalkey Archive. These novels, instead of being connected by a central plotline, are connected by a matrix of characters and the theme of catastrophe theory, an idea that proposes (unlike the traditional framework of evolution) that beings and events do not develop consistently, but follow a pattern of stability and chaos. It is during the epochs of catastrophe that beings evolve.

Hopeful Monsters, the strongest and most ambitious of the series, is set on the eve of WWII and the Spanish Revolution, and is written as a series of letters between two lovers: the heroine, Eleanor Anders, a German Jew, social activist, and anthropologist; and the hero, Max Ackerman, a promising young student of biology and physics at Cambridge University. It begins as any good experimental novel should, with a question--an implied hypothesis: "If we are to survive in the environment we have made for ourselves, may we have to be monstrous enough to greet our predicament?"

Eleanor and Max meet in 1920s Germany during a Nazi rendition of Goethe's Faust and spend the bulk of the novel separated as their opposing countries plunge into war. But sometimes--as the buildings burn and bodies bleed on this excruciating tapestry--Eleanor and Max find one another, writing, "That's when I saw you!" or "And there you were!" This immediacy, this introduction of the second-person "you," inflamed in me the purest of all the human pleasures: voyeuristic exhilaration. My eyes began to corner the page as though on rails. I stayed up all night and all day, drinking wine and coffee, until the novel had been exhausted.

What happens between these brief episodes, these nodes where the arcs of the lovers' lives intersect, is what The New York Times calls a "virtual encyclopedia of twentieth century thought, in fictional form." Wittgenstein, Einstein, and Rosa Luxemburg make cameos. The ideas of Newton, Darwin, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Marx, and other heavyweight thinkers are not only discussed in these pages but, like catastrophe theory, actually shape the structure of the text. The characters Eleanor and Max are themselves based loosely on Margaret Mead, an anthropologist, and Gregory Bateson, a cyberneticist, who were briefly married. Indeed, this entire series is rooted in the fluctuating relationship between history, science, philosophy, and human longing.

Catastrophe Practice, the first in the series and the last one that should be read, if read at all, lays out this conceptual framework with a set of three plays and a novella. The plays, though interesting in theory, are disappointing. Written by Jason--a screenwriter/playwright, who is also the subject of Serpent, as well as the collector of the letters in Hopeful Monsters and the author of its epilogue--the plays distill the human experience into confused vignettes, which fall into hyper-reflexivity. In Serpent, for instance, Jason explores issues of historical authorship and self-determination in a screenplay concerned with the mass suicide of the Zealot Jews at Masada, in 73 C.E., in lieu of being captured by the Romans. The producer's criticism, as well as mine, is that there's not enough "blood and bone." That is, Jason's characters, though they act in intriguing ways, are too theoretical, and his topic is too esoteric to be interesting to the masses.

The second novel in the series, Imago Bird, overcomes this difficulty by being simultaneously an intelligent and subtle coming-of-age novel about Bert, a 17-year-old boy, and a novel about the coming of age of an idea. Bert is the nephew of the British prime minister (Mosley himself was the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the chairman of the British Fascist Party), and has a stutter for which he is being treated by Eleanor Anders. As he becomes involved in a student Trotskyite movement--unacceptable for a nephew of a prime minister--conspiracies and power plays begin to entwine themselves around him, inflaming his catastrophic stutter. At the end of the novel, beaten down by trying to understand the politics of his environs, his own idealism, and the effect of his linguistic impediment, Bert does not experience any epiphany. Instead, he builds a model of catastrophe theory out of cardboard and rubber bands to illustrate and understand his predicament.

The second to last novel, Judith, which is also the second strongest, illustrates this theory once again. Judith is framed in a fashion similar to Hopeful Monsters in that it is a set of three letters, all penned in Judith's allusive, dreamlike voice. The letters are addressed to Bert, Max, and Jason, each of whom have been her lover. In the first letter, Judith records her thoughts during an evening socializing at various restaurants and parties while high on heroin and cocaine with a vibrator inserted into her vagina, which her lover, a painter, is able to turn on and off by remote control. This vibrator, like Bert's stutter, like Max and Eleanor's relationship, affects the prose like the stability/chaos binary of catastrophe theory. It twists her thoughts alternately outward and inward, between social interaction and uncontrollable sexual pleasure.

Though illustrations for catastrophe theory as a model of human experience are provided time and again in this series of novels, Mosley never provides a solution to the quandary. The experiments (these novels) test for a theoretical groundwork of human experience in fiction, at which Judith and Hopeful Monsters are the most successful. After I had finished Hopeful Monsters, four years ago, with my hair limp and greasy, my face flushed and lips bitten raw, I went to the computer lab to write an e-mail to my ex-lover. I attempted to pressurize my writing, to conjure her from between the gaps of my desperate mind. The reply, which arose three agonizing weeks later, was a riddled mass of rejection. A monster (hopeful, sure, but mostly heartbroken), on the "brink either of something new--or of extinction," as Mosley says, I stood and greeted the predicament I had created for myself.