Lovers and madmen begins on a November night in Montreal, Canada, amid ambulances and police cars. Cody Kohl, a graduate student, overhears a woman declare her love for another man. “She whispered, ‘Pleure-pas. Nous sommes ensemble. Nous serons toujours ensemble.’ Don’t cry. We are together. We will always be together.”

His head still reeling and his body aching from some sort of accident, Cody wanders to his favorite refuge—the trails of Mount Royal. As a snow storm begins, Cody slips into unconsciousness. He lies on a bed of leafmeal under gathering snow.

Cody’s dream-thoughts float back to February of the previous winter, to the day when Cody first met his French-Canadian neighbor, Nicolette Étienne. From there, the romantic yet harrowing year replays in Cody’s subconscious, including moments like these:

Taking crunching, squeaking steps in the snow of McGill University’s frozen campus, Cody tries his best to be open to the musings of his friend Bevan, a vagabond philosopher originally from Czechoslovakia. But Cody, somewhat drunk, finds himself resenting Bev when the older man calmly crosses a frozen top layer of deep snow, while Cody sinks down and has to plow through like an icebreaker.

In summer, the combination of barely restrained lust for Nicolette and passages from Lady Chatterley's Lover send Cody “out the door like a swollen, turgid arrow.” Rounding a corner onto rue Sainte-Catherine, his lust is only mocked by a three-story, neon depiction of a nude woman above one of the striptease clubs. “Her giant looped-neon nipples flashed, confirming the eroticism in the air. She justified my horniness.” After a stop inside, he moves east to the darkest realms of Montreal’s gritty streets. He ends up having a sexual, but unconsummated, interlude with a prostitute. Afterward, he feels sad for the prostitute and disgusted with himself.