"Normally,” wrote Susan Sontag in her essay on The Pornographic Imagination, “we don’t experience, at least don’t want to experience, our sexual fulfilment as distinct from or opposed to our personal fulfilment. But perhaps in part they are distinct, whether we like it or not.” Howard Jacobson’s latest novel, The Act of Love, has as its protagonist Felix Quinn, a man who finds both agony and ecstasy in insisting on the distinction between his sexual and personal fulfilment.

Sontag remarked in the same essay that “sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness”. Jacobson, whose literary interest in the demonic nature of sexuality is intense – even if his treatment of the subject in earlier novels has tended towards the antic end of the demonic spectrum – undertakes in The Act of Love to anatomise the dire power of sexual love in the most refined and civilised of settings.

Felix Quinn is bookish both by nature and occupation. An antiquarian bookseller by trade and an avid and fastidious reader by inclination, he draws “no distinction between literature and life”. His nature both anticipates and is formed by his literary tastes: “I was born lovesick – unrequited, highly strung, quiveringly jealous .?.?. That I too would be spurned, I never doubted.”

His future unhappiness thus assured, it remains only for Felix to devise a sufficiently exquisite mise-en-scène for his drama of erotic anguish. “A great endeavour lures me on,” he remarks, echoing that other bibliophile, Humbert Humbert. No man, he asserts, “has ever adored a woman who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else”. And what pains he takes to demonstrate his own adoration for his beautiful wife, Marisa.