Bloomsbury. 272 pp. $24.95

A black-and-white sketch of this antihero looks pretty unsympathetic - he's a paunchy, self-absorbed neurotic who cheats on his wife weekly with prostitutes. A creep, you could say. Luckily, as he gets filled in with the colors of author Sarvas' full palette, Harry begins to look much more human.

Sarvas, a first-time novelist, who keeps the literary blog the Elegant Variation, has built an entertaining book around this character sketch. He also has a neat knack for revealing information slowly, allowing the story to unfold like a mystery of sorts - which, actually, is more or less what it is. It's a marriage mystery, a whodunit of what-went-wrong.

In fact, it's not until the end of the first chapter that we find out that Harry's wife has just died.

Sarvas spends the first several pages immersing his readers so totally in twitch-inducing Harry Land that when the neurotic dance of his interior life lands on the chapter's final two words - "wife's funeral" - they drop with a little kerplunk into the pit of the stomach.

So, yeah. His wife is dead. We know her death was untimely, and we know that Harry feels queasily responsible for it. But for a while, we don't know much else. We just watch Harry wander around his tasteful, minimal, personality-free Beverly Hills dream house alone and listless. When he tries to reflect on his wife's life, he finds "there's a curious void where the well of memory should be," a "lacuna in his heart."

But then he thinks of Molly, and the pain - or the curiously uncomfortable absence of it - leaks away.

Oh, Molly. She's the black-haired beauty of Harry's fantasies; she represents so much. Molly waits tables at the retro-kitsch diner where Harry has his pre-funeral lunch - and which quickly becomes his new favorite place to eat.

Molly is a grad student and a feminist, all of 22, but Harry doesn't know that much about her yet. He just likes to watch her move around the restaurant as she serves, trying for a glimpse of her midriff, the nape of her white neck, the wings she has tattooed on her back that make her look - to his middle-aged eyes - like the perfect blend of angel and not-so-angelic. He is smitten, but more than that, he's determined. He decides it's actually possible for him to get this girl, and he proceeds to woo her in a disastrously, hilariously underhanded way.

On his first visit to the diner, Harry asks Molly for a recommendation. She suggests the oily-sweet Monte Cristo sandwich (which he can barely choke down), and the seed is planted: He develops a mild fixation on the Count of Monte Cristo, and his own transformation begins to develop along similar lines. After all, Harry's old life has ended, but he's returned to it, different and unrecognized.

No one at the diner knows what a jerk he is. He could change. So, he tries to, with both funny and gut-punching results, giving away money and favors to people who need them, even though - like Edmond Dantes - he does his good deeds for self-centered reasons.

In Harry, Sarvas has given us a painfully realistic sort of fellow, the kind who has most often found himself on the low end of the coolness spectrum, and yet he has the classic overreach of the underdog. He's sure he can win this impossible dream of a girl if he's patient and focused, so he spends all of his energy in the weeks following his wife's death trying to seem like a good guy. In the end, he turns out to be, if not precisely good, better. Happier. Harry 2.0.

There are whiffs early on in Harry, Revised of an overdone wryness, an occasional feeling of trying too hard, and sometimes the language seems pleased with itself.

Some of the biographical details - like Harry's never-mentioned, conveniently long-dead parents, as well as his wife's parents' sudden deaths in a car crash - feel like easy ways out.

But the truly funny and insightful moments that follow those missteps outweigh them and become the more memorable details. Most of the time, the language is very good.

Harry lies in bed "poking at the carcass of the day." He wants to be a bad boy, but has "a mystique deficit." When he gets the news his wife has died, he's "the spaceman snipped off from his EVA. The child at the mall staring at a sea of adult kneecaps he doesn't recognize. A one-man Donner party."

And throughout the novel, Sarvas gives us beautiful bits of wisdom about marriage, which is really what this story is about. This is a book for grown-ups, for people who know how complex adult relationships are.

Maybe it's possible to become better, to revise, we think as we watch Harry crash around in the darkness toward a little sliver of light.

Can't hurt to try.