With his 2002 novel "The Horned Man," James Lasdun delivered a taut tale about a New York college professor trapped in an existential nightmare.

His latest, "Seven Lies" (Norton, $23.95), has some of the elements of its predecessor (mystery, love story), and some new ones (coming-of-age narrative, portrait of a dictatorship). Both are about guilt and shame.

"Seven Lies" opens at a cocktail party where a woman inflicts a shocking insult on a guest named Stefan Vogel. The reason will become clear only much later, after Vogel's American Dream has fallen apart in lies and betrayals.

Vogel, a refugee from East Germany, is a character brought low at an early age; his father was a high-flying diplomat who traveled frequently to America on missions for the communist regime and would come back with small treasures —— a Slinky, a diver's watch —— the petty knickknacks that become the bedrock of Vogel's lifelong dream of somehow getting past the Berlin Wall and settling in America.

Through furtive sex, lies and petty theft, Stefan grows up adept at subterfuge in pursuit of the America he lost when his father came to grief. "One of the advantages of living on our side of the Wall was our ability to believe that happiness did actually exist somewhere on earth, namely in the West." So he diligently games the system from within and without, making anti-Western propaganda displays for the government while worming his way into his future wife's dissident community.

One way the East Germans would get rid of their dissidents and other undesirables would be to sell them to West Germany for hard currency. But the authorities clearly don't rate his work very highly. When Stefan's turn comes to be sold to the West, his freedom is traded for two truckloads of second-grade oranges.

"Seven Lies" gives sharp insights into the pernicious characteristics of the East German system, and the endless dance of betrayals-within-betrayals through which the state could turn an entirely average human being into a complete louse.

There are the contortions inflicted on the German language in its communist straitjacket; the secret policeman whose little boy plays with Lege ("Only a zealot would have inflicted that dismal knockoff of Western Legos on his child; most men in his position would have obtained a set of the real thing"); the state's trafficking of dissidents for hard currency (though in Stefan's case, in the bleak humor of the novel, the price was those inferior oranges).

Stefan and his wife, Inge, finally land in New York in 1986, and Lasdun, an Englishman, brings an arresting outsider's eye to the faces of New York that Stefan is in love with:

"The grime and grunge, the filthy subway cars lurching by in a fluorescent lichen of graffiti, the street-cleaning vehicles whirling their medieval-looking brooms over the crack vials and sodden porn mags of the East Village gutters. … And then the buildings themselves, the skyscrapers, my childhood fetishes … the Empire State like a great syringe with some fiery elixir of the city vatted inside it, the Helmsley in its gold tiara, the Twin Towers reading each other's paragraphs of light. …

"How I loved this place!"

Alas, his beloved Inge has the opposite reaction; Every newspaper story about old people freezing and children gunned down reduces her to despair. And then the past starts to catch up as the communist system starts to totter. Suddenly the secrets that Stefan had believed were locked up forever behind the Berlin Wall threaten to be revealed, like "some cruel cosmic joke directed at me, me personally …"

Bringing us back to that ghastly incident at the cocktail party.

"Seven Lies," like "The Horned Man," works like fingers around the throat, gradually tightening their grip as revelation follows revelation. It is grimly funny, painfully sad and beautifully written.