Adam Thirlwell’s novel The Escape opens in a spa town in the Alps, with a 78-year-old man hiding in a wardrobe while a much younger couple has sex outside of it. The septuagenarian voyeur is Raphael Haffner: geriatric playboy, conflicted Jew and negligent family man. He is visiting a resort near Trieste in the hopes of winning what he considers his “inheritance” – a nearby villa that belonged to his late wife. He’s having trouble focusing on the real estate, though, due to two affairs he’s struck up at the resort, one with a yoga teacher and another with a married, middle-aged woman. These trysts are hardly his first; we learn that Haffner’s been chasing women for most of his life. He’s part Leonard Cohen, part Guido Anselmi from 8½: the eternal, sophisticated rake, still vaguely dashing, in a rumpled way, after more than seven decades.

Like his guiding light Milan Kundera, Thirlwell (who was named by Granta as one of the “best young British novelists”) is adept at intertwining philosophical and erotic strands in his work. Men and women don’t simply screw; each coupling is an opportunity for the author to expound on fate, lust, history and psychology. While Haffner entertains his dual romances in the spa town, he’s haunted by memories of his own infidelities. (In fact, he can’t look at anything – a nipple, a wrought-iron gate – without it reminding him of some specter from the past.) Confusion is sex, indeed: Haffner never figures out whether he’s squandered his life or enjoyed it to its erotic fullest.

But even as Thirlwell aspires to Kundera’s sexed-up intellect, he manages to avoid the Czech author’s pompous self-regard, and effortlessly blends reflections on memory with, say, hanky-panky in bathtubs. The result – enough to shock even a dedicated philanderer – is an accessibly cerebral story of one man and his tragic libido.

Scott Indrisek