Eccentricity, at least the kind that mixes the absurd with the poignant, has been scarce in the American novel since John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" came out 25 years ago. Since then the form has seen mostly shtickier stuff, from the self-reference of David Foster Wallace to, more recently, the in-jokiness of Dave Eggers and his McSweeney's crew.

There is apparently no such shortage in the Netherlands, where the best-selling Arnon Grunberg turns out Dutch-language novels at once wickedly funny and endearingly sympathetic -- and tinged with social insight.

Mr. Grunberg's "The Story of My Baldness" is technically a coming- of-age story, though to call it that would be like calling "Hamlet" a murder mystery. Mr. Grunberg's narrator, Marek van der Jagt (also the real name of the author, but more on that later), is a young man whose naivete is just off-kilter enough to feel authentic. He might be taken for a lighter version of Jerzy Kosinski's oblivious Chauncey Gardiner from "Being There."

Marek jumps between past and present, telling of bungled romances. He is searching, as he often reminds us, for l'amour fou, mad love, which in his case means everything from mere sex to companionate love to parental acceptance. The last one is trickier that it sounds. Marek's flamboyant mother is a caricature of the indifferent parent. At one of her son's moments of extreme vulnerability, she can only ask whether anyone has seen her cigarette lighter.

Marek's lovers are hardly more sensitive. One in particular, a tourist he meets in a teenage flashback, bursts out laughing when she gets a glimpse of his anatomy, or what Marek comes to call "my handicap." The handicap sends our anti-hero off in search of, well, improvement. He contemplates plastic surgery, searches for a father figure, and copes with the overbearing mother of a love interest, all in his sweet attempts to ease his shame.

If this sounds like a parody of Freudian theory, it should. (Mr. Grunberg even sets his story in Vienna.) But it is more than that. The painful interactions of the sensitive Marek with the uncaring world appear to be an emblem for the culture of egoism; Marek's mother is a case study in self-involvement and its destructive effect on the family.

Mr. Grunberg employs the pseudonym Marek van der Jagt so that the main character has a name that at first appears to be real and the author has a name that is, literally, fictional. What all this adds up is not clear, and Mr. Grunberg does not seem terribly concerned with figuring it out, just as he's not concerned with certain conventions of the novel form, like exposition. But the book is too whimsical to demand so strict an accounting. And Mr. Grunberg's talent for tucking philosophical nuggets into his hijinx elevates his story well above farce. "If you've been longing to hear someone's voice for a very long time," Marek wonders, "does it matter what the voice says?" If it's Mr. Grunberg's, it certainly does.