Titling a novel after its protagonist seems a little like cheating in that it smuggles gravitas into the eponymous character before the book even gets opened. Only when it really seems inevitable should it be done — when the character is the book and dominates every page. “The Catcher in the Rye,” for example, could have fairly been titled “Holden Caulfield.” Fortunately, that standard is pretty well epitomized by Sebastian Faulks’s immersive, impressive new novel “Engleby” (Doubleday, 336 pages, $24.95), which is the life story of Mike Engleby as told from the exclusive perspective of Mike Engleby.

The details of Engleby’s life appear straightforward. A briskly intelligent but misanthropic youth from grimy Trafalgar Terrace, he goes from being beaten at home by his father to being beaten at boarding school by a fearsome prefect named Baynes, whose “complexion looked as though a carton of raspberry yoghurt had exploded in his face.” Like all school bullies, Baynes assumes an air of sadistic familiarity with his favorite victim: “Come here when I call you, Toilet. Don’t you know your own name?” But then Baynes takes a leg-breaking, head-cracking stumble one night while walking alone.

Then it’s on to Cambridge and young adulthood, as apolitical Engleby narrates his cold, friendless years spent acing exams and selling dope in the liberal early ’70s. “Lonely looks after itself,” Engleby tells the reader, describing endless solitary nights in his room or at the cinema. But here he is, just pages earlier, wryly dissembling: “Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. … Another evening with Mike? Yes, that’s fine. I like Mike.” This is a guy who knows himself both too well and hardly at all.

One subject to which Engleby always returns is his fascination with a popular classmate named Jennifer Arkland, whose life seems painfully whole in comparison to his. I say “fascination” because it’s not exactly attraction — the articulate, observant Engleby never really provides much physical description, and he certainly never asks her out. He just sort of reports on her whereabouts. In part, his oddly clinical attitude toward Jennifer may be related to his low opinion of women in general (“weirdly obsessed by appearances … no interest in ideas or deeper truths… beings who live close to the ground”), but it also comes off a bit like defensive posturing. Perhaps our narrator can’t admit he has a simple crush and all the silly, wistful emotions that go along with it? But then Jennifer disappears one night from a party and is never seen again.

The police never make an arrest; Engleby graduates and moves to London . While his classmates become “arterial cash explosions” in the financial realm, Engleby stumbles into journalism, gets a girlfriend, builds a career, and starts going bald. It’s during this middle period that “Engleby” lags a bit as Mr. Faulks gives his narrator a few too many ruminative paragraphs on the decline of England and so forth. Concern sets in — will the rest of the novel consist of arbitrary and immobile rants? Fortunately, the last hundred pages of “Engleby” are mordantly precise and exquisitely tactical: It’s like watching a kind of surgery. Mr. Faulks has created something really eerie and memorable with this novel, and he’s taken care and time to do it.

The success of “Engleby” is due entirely to the skill and talent that have gone into creating its protagonist, an erratic, mesmerizing person whose only human relationship is with himself. (Consider the initials Mr. Faulks has given him.) “There’s no such thing as a coherent and fully integrated human personality,” Engleby asserts, and you can see why he might think that. When he gets rattled, he says things such as, “It was as though all the molecules that made the entity known as ‘Mike Engleby’ had been kept in place by some weird centripetal force — which had unaccountably failed. Now those particles were flying outward into chaos.” And then he blacks out and does god knows what.

But his voice is so funny, so incisive and deliciously critical — he’ll even recite passages from earlier in the book to mock his own prose — that you’re inclined to stick with him, sharing his wry contempt for the strange and impenetrable social customs of “homo saps.” In attitude, Engleby’s not far from Charles Highway of Martin Amis’s “The Rachel Papers;” in reliability, he’s more akin to Patrick Bateman of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho.” And with those two, he’s in fine company.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Kate Christensen. His first novel, “Fires,” was published by Impetus Press.