A FLOOR PLAN OF THE HEART

By Pico Iyer

Alain De Botton won a lot of half-envious attention with his first book, On Love, a tale that seasoned an alan as Gallic as his name with an irony as British as his upbringing. The genius of the book, written when he was 23 and translated into 13 languages, was to chart the parabolic trajectory of a love, while showing that charts tell us nothing we need to know of love. De Botton looked at the sophistries of the heart with a mix of pop psychology and learning that made his novel sing like a Cosmo article ghost-written by Descartes.

In his second novel, The Romantic Movement (Picador USA; 326 pages; $23), the unforgivably young and unforgivably knowing writer, now 25, gives us more of the same, presenting himself as a Stendhal of the '90s dating scene. Alice works in an ad agency, Eric in commodities. They meet at a ball, go to trendy London restaurants, take a holiday in Barbados; gradually, obligingly, they settle into their roles like glossy-magazine archetypes in a masque. He's a self-contained realist, she a self-doubting romantic. He won't talk and she won't stop. Their ups and downs are delicately choreographed by a well-read Puck who's not afraid of quoting Thales, Heraclitus, Hegel, Marx and five others in a single paragraph.

The charm of De Botton's books comes from his ability to regard the oldest profession in the world (the words "I love you") with a youthful sense of playfulness and discovery. Here he offers disquisitions on the "love right angle," "psychological hypochondria" and "jollyism" and likens the self, in quick succession, to a tumble dryer, a weather pattern and a TV set. The pages of the novel are sprinkled with diagrams, floor plans of the heart and even a picture of a can of Campbell's soup-which reflect, in their way, the games and strategies we practice in love. "I love you," De Botton realizes, can be a question, a prompt or an opening bid.

The Romantic Movement is somewhat more diffuse and abstract than his first book, and if believers will say he's refining his theme, skeptics will feel he's repeating himself. Still, it is stuffed with details that feel as familiar as old coins rediscovered in one's back pocket. Light as a souffla, and no less addictive, The Romantic Movement is that happiest of artifacts, a novel that smiles.