The novel's title is an allusion to Dostoevsky, and the narrator, Xiao Shao, frequently alludes to and quotes Western intellectuals -- Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Goethe, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and others -- and Western films and art. The death of a lover from AIDS serves as the primary catalyst for the narrator's extended reflections on mortality, solitude, and desolation, which form the core of this elegiac novel. This core is overlaid with often-humorous accounts of Xiao Shao's relationships, almost-polemical discussions of the international gay rights movement, detailed and metaphorical descriptions of sexual and sensuous experiences, and philosophical reflections on "foreign" culture. The idea of marginality is explored through the narrator's experiences as a homosexual, which reflect the novelist's own feelings as a second-generation Mainlander living in Taiwan.

"Notes Of A Desolate Man" will appeal not only to readers of fiction, especially gay literature, but also to anyone interested in Taiwanese identity in the shadow of greater China or by the impact of Westernization.