FICTION

THE STRANGE CASE OF MADEMOISELLE P. by Brian O’Doherty (Pantheon: $17; 185 pp.) Before settling on “Humbert Humbert,” the narrator of Nabokov’s “Lolita” considers adopting several other pseudonyms, including “Mesmer Mesmer”--a tribute to the Svengali-like legend surrounding the 18th-Century Austrian pioneer of medical hypnosis, whose name comes down to us as a verb: to mesmerize.

In Brian O’Doherty’s beguiling first novel, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer is innocent of nymphet-chasing, but the father of one of his patients, 18-year-old Marie Therese Paradies, suspects him of it and contrives to ruin his career. Decades later, near death, Mesmer himself is tortured by erotic dreams of the girl and comes to doubt his previous rectitude.

For the other characters, too, reality is flickering and elusive. Marie Therese, hysterically blind since age 3, experiences her first glimmerings of renewed sight as disorientation and pain. A gifted pianist (she plays duets with Mozart), she loses her touch once she can see her hands. Her father, an official at the court of Empress Maria Theresa, is oblivious to his own responsibility for his daughter’s condition and is so blinded by cynical “common sense” (and by understandable skepticism about Mesmer’s theory that illness is caused by disturbances in “magnetic fluids” that flow through the universe and every creature in it) that he sabotages the treatment, plunging the girl back into darkness.

It’s the old, sad story of the innovator who hooks a big fish but can’t pull it out of the water to identify it, and the envy and hostility this half-discovery arouses. O’Doherty has turned a bit of history into a meditation on the perils of truth-seeking, a deft mimicry of period style, a fugue of three contrasting voices. He excels in rendering delicate psychological and visual states. The only flaw is that most of the drama comes at the beginning; if this were music, it would be a crashing chord followed by a lingering echo.