Second Read Alexander Chee’s début novel, published twenty-five years ago, collapses past and present in a brilliant account of abuse and its aftermath.

“Edinburgh” is the kind of book that readers talk about in whispers and pass from hand to hand. I mean this literally, at least in my case: I found it, only a year or two after it came out, because my teacher, the poet Carl Phillips—I was doing an M.F.A. in poetry, in St. Louis—handed a copy to me and told me I had to read it right away. He never did this with any other book, and I didn’t waste any time doing as he said; and so the novel took its place, when I was twenty-three or twenty-four, in that private constellation that I looked to for guidance as I started out in a life in art-making. A point on an aesthetic compass.

What We’re Reading After he dies, missing Peter for me is like swimming in the cold spot of the lake: everyone else laughing in the warm water under some too-close summer sun. This is the answer to the question no one asks me.

The book’s formal choices respond to a psychological crisis: something has happened to Fee’s experience of time; something has turned time into a question. The story the first half of “Edinburgh” tells is a distressingly familiar one of child sexual abuse, rendered here with uncommon emotional precision. Fee joins a community children’s choir; he has a revelatory experience of beauty, and of himself as a conduit for that beauty; the same man who makes that revelation possible, by introducing him to art, abuses him and other members of the choir.

Chee is sparing of physical detail but unsparing in dissecting the social and psychological dynamics of abuse. We see how the choir director—the choir calls him Big Eric—enlists his victims in communal silence, how he makes them feel special, members of an elect; we see how he makes use of precisely what children need from adults (attention, affection, education) to victimize them.