Reading may be one of life’s most solitary pursuits, but few others bring one as close to another person. That relationship tends to be one-sided, however — an inequity Mark Moskowitz tries to rectify in his first feature documentary. Moskowitz recalls (the film luxuriates in the first-person discursive mode) how as a college undergraduate in 1972 he picked up a 600-page novel, Dow Mossman’s The Stones of Summer, which the New York Times described as "burning with generational fire." Maybe not for this 18-year-old: he couldn’t plow through it. Twenty-five years later, he picked it up again by chance and couldn’t put it down. Enthralled, he tried to find everything else written by the author. He found nothing, and hardly any evidence that the book or author even existed.

Sounds like a Jorge Luis Borges mystery, but Moskowitz’s search for Mossman putters about its subject like someone browsing in a bookstore, or maybe like Mossman’s own free-associative method of writing his novel (so I gather from the descriptions and excerpts in the film; the book has long been out of print, though the film may change that). Rather than taking the direct approach to tracking the man down — say, checking the Yahoo People Search — Moskowitz asks himself such questions as, "If I could speak to anyone about reading, who would it be?", and then sits down with legendary literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who rambles on about the phenomenon of the one-book author.

Others consulted include author Frank Conroy, agent Carl Brandt, and John Seelye, the critic who wrote the original Times review. By the time Moskowitz nears his quarry, the reclusive Mossman seems almost irrelevant to this sometimes overbearing, sometimes brilliant celebration of the pleasures of reading and the bond not so much between reader and author as among those who love to read. (128 minutes)