Joseph Burr, a classics professor at California’s Mission University, has promoted an obscure theory he calls liminality into an international speaking tour he hopes will put him on the trail of his vanished son. Those scenes are genuinely shocking, as is his father’s discovery that Owen has been dumped in a Berlin hospital, hallucinating and suffering from bacterial meningitis. 'A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall' by Will Chancellor (Harper/Harper)

Chancellor finesses the probability issue with a foray into decadent Berlin nightlife that ends with Owen, drugged and semi-conscious, being used as the subject of photos mimicking the recently exposed images of torture at Abu Ghraib. This is very familiar stuff, and it’s not entirely persuasive that Owen agrees to a collaboration with Kurt that he knows is exploitative. In Berlin, he enters the amoral, publicity-driven world of Kurt Wagener, an artist in a wheelchair whose wild success is built on a canny combination of clichéd conceptual exhibits (a museum filled with 12 million orange ping-pong balls) and mocking remarks lapped up by the media: “It’s not really art at all. Owen can still see colors, actually what he’s lost is his place in a coherent universe. Now, “this nameless world was colorless, collapsed,” and if he can’t go to Athens to play Olympic polo, he’ll go to Berlin and become an artist. The accident also deprives Owen of his personal religion, an idiosyncratic pairing of four ancient Greek gods with the colors peridot, gamboge, carmine and ultramarine. When Owen Burr loses his left eye in the final water polo match of his Stanford University career, he loses his berth on the 2004 U.S. Will Chancellor’s first novel, “A Brave Man Seven Stories Tall,” is not always quite as clever as the author intends, but it has plenty of energy to atone for its predictable satiric targets and some real emotional heft to counter the whiffs of pretentiousness.

How tall is nott the brave