With section titles like e-mails to the coast', Accelerator', Decelerator', and Postscript: Three Teachers', the narrator of "The Syllabus" -- M -- digresses, fantasizes, catalogues and invents, slowly recovering the strands of childhood exploration and adolescent obsession, joy and morbidity, that have led him to both alienation and freedom. First friend, first love, first sex, inklings of vocation: all of the elements of the Bildungsroman are here, but put in a high-speed blender that tracks the hallucinatory smears they leave on the mind. Using a collage-like technique that mixes times and genres -- flashing forward and backward in a narrative that is, by turns, confessional, meditative, lyrical and comic -- "The Syllabus" traces the crooked path by which one student makes his way through, and beyond, the proscribed syllabus.