John Banville is a literary stylist of the old school, a vanishing breed expected to win a Nobel Prize one of these days. His kind of novel – once the embodiment of the literary experience – is fading, and few people take the time or spend the money to read writing like this. Like many of the great writers, Banville, who lives in Ireland (“Kepler,”  “The Sea,”  “Shroud And The Untouchable”) uses words the way Beethoven wrote music – every word considered and polished, his writing lyrical,  beautiful and considered. He can say more in a few sentences about someone’s bearing than many writers can squeeze into a book. In our hurried and distracted world, this kind of book seems both a throwback and a treasure. A luxury perhaps, especially in America, the land of too much information and hyper-story telling. Like all of the greatest novelists, his subject matter is our interior selves, in this case time memory, sex and longing, youth and aging, success and failure. In other words, life.

His books are an event, and his new novel “Ancient Light” is much in keeping with his genius for textual and conceptual precision. His descriptions of the smallest things – people’s clothing, the sky, a memory or thought – are lyrical, pure genius, a gorgeous feast for people who love words.

The story is told by the brooding aging actor Alexander Cleave, recalling memories of his long-ago summer affair with a 35-year-old woman, Mrs. Gray. At the time, Cleave was 15 and Mrs. Gray was his best friend’s mother.  The love affair shaped Cleave’s emotional life in many ways.  His mind also struggles to comprehend the death of his daughter, believed to have committed suicide while working in Italy. When his failing acting career is suddenly revived by an unexpected offer to star in a movie, Cleave’s leading lady, famous and fragile, unwittingly provides a window to see with haunting clarity the vast chasm between the doing of a thing and the recalling of what was done.

Cleave describing the first day of his affair: “What could she want of me? The obvious was not the obvious. I was only fifteen remember? I was torn between the impulse to plunge headlong down the stairs and flee the house, never to darken its doorstep again, and an opposite urge to stand my ground, and turn, and open wide my arms for this lavish and unlooked-for gift of womanhood, naked as a needle…all breathless and a-flutter and drooping with desire.” The affair ends suddenly and Mrs. Gray vanishes mysteriously, and all of his life Cleave wonders what happened to them, to her.

This gorgeous book – that is the word that comes to mind about the writing – focuses on the intensity of adolescence, the loss of a beloved child, the struggle between memory and reality. Banville doesn’t need to hide behind woman-eating serial killers to engage the reader. Words can do it.  Modern fiction usually has lots of bangs and bumps, over-the-top twists and turns to engage the cynical, easily bored and jacked-up reader in an age when stories and books of all kinds in many forms rain literally from the sky. You can say “Ancient Lights” is really about nothing as compared to contemporary stands of fiction – no deaths, violence, serial killers or victim’s of Lou Gehrig’s disease, the American novelists favorite new manipulative engage-the-reader tool.

But the book is about everything. Cleave has to deal with the passion of first love, the betrayal of his best friend, a hollow but committed marriage, a fading acting career, the suicide of his  daughter, about which he understands nothing and knows little. All of his life, he remembers the details of his affair with Mrs Gray, and the way in which it ended. Near the end of his life, he gets to discover and understand the truth of all of it and come to an honest reckoning of his own life. To the truth. If you love language, this book is a feast and a treasure. Every page is like a painting, love and faith, loss and death all woven today in a magnificent tapestry. The book cautions us to beware of memory, it plays lots of tricks, and works to serve us rather than give us the truth.

I read very few writers like John Banville and I easily recommend this book for people who savor a gentle and brilliantly crafted look at the interior self, a trip into the experiences and recollections that shape our consciousness. Perhaps not for people who like the roller coaster twists of contemporary story-telling. Banville is a wonderful writer, a painter of words really, as much as a gifted story-teller. “Ancient Lights” is published by Knopf and available in print and digital editions.