This is the kind of desire evoked in Molly Dektar’s new novel, “The Absolutes.” Dektar opens with her narrator, 15-year-old Nora, spending a year in Italy with distant relatives. It’s here that she meets the handsome and wealthy 19-year-old Nicola, a young man who becomes the object of her lifelong devotion. Their ensuing relationship (and its many twists and turns over more than a decade) becomes the propulsive force of the novel. Teenage girls are mirrors, reflecting whatever society decides to project upon them. Because the story begins with Nora at her most impressionable — she’s a high-schooler, and an immature one at that — the subsequent love story between Nicola and an adult Nora becomes mired in the far-reaching rings of desire that started from a place of teenage yearning.

There is much to admire in the way Dektar delves headlong into this delayed adolescence. Nora is obsessed with seeing and being seen, and because of this, she projects her own feelings and worries onto other characters, without waiting to see what those people think or feel. The effect is one of supreme unreliability; it is Nora’s world, and we’re simply living in it.

Another example of this deferred adolescence crops up in the notion of “goodness.” Throughout the novel, characters consider what “good” might mean. People are described as good, lovers as good; morals are either good or lacking in goodness. Desire itself is a cleanly pure thing, good simply because it exists. As a teenager, Nora pits desire against canine behavior and subsequently ascribes the notion to herself: “The best dogs will do anything for a treat,” her relative Federica says to her. “Desire didn’t make me stupid,” Nora thinks after Federica makes this statement. “Desire made me sharp, and good.” Is goodness merely the idea of compliance? Does it mean obedience without ever questioning authority? Dektar seems to lean into this notion, ascribing goodness and intimacy to power dynamics when it comes to sex, but she also implies that goodness might be found when someone chooses not to hold someone else accountable for their actions. Nora is good for Nicola because she does not cause him undue stress. She is good when she behaves in ways that do not upset his life.

Wanting to be seen only as one’s most perfect self is a thrilling through line in this novel. But that is a fantasy, and what is a fantasy other than a wish for fulfillment that cannot be met? The hollowness of the self, the way we wish to be known but cannot. The ways we imagine a partner thinking and behaving, when ultimately all we know is whatever information the person has offered up to us. We cannot live inside our lovers’ heads, no matter how desperately we might wish to, but we can imagine what they might be thinking. Nora will never truly know Nicola, and he will never really know Nora. And therein lies the delight of what it means to want and ache and need. The satisfaction is not necessarily the point; it’s the desire that matters.

Changeability — and the ways Nora could grow into someone outside of her teenage self — are not considered with any real seriousness. Does Nora know she’s behaving in ways that are counterintuitive to achieving the satisfaction she desires? Perhaps, but I find that the less interesting question when it comes to these characters. And Nora is full of questions: for herself, for her partners, for the world. She occasionally finds answers, but the questions often merely serve as tools for further obfuscation. Nora asks them in order to slide away from the truth, focusing instead on the “goodness” of what obedience provides, a place where longing can be more acutely felt. It’s a riveting thing, desire; “The Absolutes” asks you to consider what matters more: the moment the stone is dropped into the pool or the ripples that spread across the surface long after the stone has sunk out of sight. Either answer could be right.

Kristen Arnett is the New York Times best-selling queer author of the novels “Mostly Dead Things” and “With Teeth.”