Like the narrator of Marcel Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, the storyteller in Brad Leithauser's fifth novel, A Few Corrections, doesn't reveal his name until he's waded through a considerable chunk of his story. Leithauser makes the parallel inescapable by pointedly referencing Remembrance on the same page where his narrator's name—and identity, and relationship to the true subject of the novel—finally become apparent for the first time, more than a third of the way in. The self-conscious affectation involved in every aspect of this conceit would be insufferable if A Few Corrections weren't so amiable, well-crafted, and not otherwise given to such barefaced blatancy. The book centers on small-town Midwesterner Wesley Sultan, a handsome womanizer whose early joy in his life, and in his remarkable beauty and charm, gradually faded as his sales career failed to give way to bigger and better things. His relationships dissolved, his fortunes and good looks crumbled, and eventually he died, bitter and bemused, at 63, in a hospital 10 miles from the small Michigan town where he grew up. Or did he? Leithauser's obscured narrator begins the novel with Sultan's newspaper obituary and the flat, arresting statement, "There are at least a dozen errors here." These errors are mostly minor but personally telling, and each serves as a gateway to a new understanding of Sultan's personality. The narrator reveals them one by one, chapter by chapter, much as he reveals himself. His earliest anecdotes are told from an omniscient viewpoint that lends them a sprightly, abstract fairytale quality, and it's a rude shock when he suddenly inserts himself into the story, first as a conscious presence, then as a specific character with a specific goal in mind. His emergence is slightly awkward and somewhat discomfiting, but Sultan's similar emergence from his cut-and-dried postmortem, as he's revealed through his family's simple but colorful stories, is an honest, open pleasure. Leithauser's bibliography is evenly split between novels and volumes of poetry, which explains his easy comfort with expressive but precise language. He fleshes out his story with tiny, compelling flights of narrative fancy that make this book like an Easter-egg hunt in more ways than one. Like the obscure truths about Wesley and his occluded biographer, the little details that make A Few Corrections memorable are well worth the search.