The story is an exploration of the impact having such a gift on a person, and then losing it. David Selig has spent hid whole life trying to hide his ability. In doing so he has become paranoid and finds relationships with other people difficult. This ongoing quest to hide his ability is the strongest part of the book. It's told in a series of flashbacks to earlier episodes in his life. The few people who do discover his gift he has difficult relationships with, from an ex-girlfriend who discovers the secret while taking drugs, to a fellow telepath he can never quite trust, to the sister he has a strained relationship with.
At the start of the novel David's power to read minds has been diminishing for some time and he is currently trying to make a living ghost-writing papers for students at a local university. The implication of the novel is that by hiding his talent and being afraid to use it he has wasted both the talent and his obvious intelligence (which is shown by him guaranteeing good marks on the papers he ghost-writes).
Despite trying to hide and not make use of his talent, it has come to define who he is.The novel tries to explore what losing that talent does to him. Unfortunately for me, it does a poor job of this. I don't get a clear sense of what he is going through. There doesn't appear to be much difference between the character when his power to read minds is fully available in the flashbacks, and in the scenes where he is struggling with its loss.
I struggled with this book. It was too uneven for me with some very good writing mixed with some that felt a struggle to read. Overall it's a great concept for a novel which is only partly successful in realising it.
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