A story about being in love, "The Black Prince" is also a remarkable intellectual thriller with a superbly involuted plot, and a meditation on the nature of art and love and the deity who rules over both. Bradley Pearson, its narrator and hero, is an elderly writer with a 'block'. Encompassed by predatory friends and relations - his ex-wife, her delinquent brother and a younger, deplorably successful writer, Arnold Baffin, together with Baffin's restless wife and youthful daughter - Bradley...