In the late 1980s, fiction writer Susan Minot, long a part-time Mainer, blasted onto the literary scene with a couple of books, one of which was 1989’s “Lust and Other Stories.” In the collection’s indelible title story, a woman tells of her adolescent sexual awakening, presented in an elegant series of short, breathtaking paragraphs, not many of which are suitable for reproduction here. Readers familiar with “Lust” will greet Minot’s sixth novel, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” with recognition — because of her frequent use of whisper-quick paragraphs separated by section breaks and because of the through line of female desire, although this time it’s emanating from somewhere else on the age spectrum.

“Don’t Be a Stranger: A Novel,” by Susan Minot. Knopf, hardcover, 320 pages. $28

Set in early 2010s Manhattan, “Don’t Be a Stranger” opens with 52-year-old writer Ivy Cooper meeting Ansel Fleming, the man who will consume her thoughts for most of the novel. Ivy has been divorced for about a year and has a young son; Ansel is a thirtysomething singer-songwriter from Chicago with a beautiful face and, as Ivy was tipped off by the mutual friend who introduced them, a prison record. He was released two years earlier, after serving seven for a nonviolent drug offense.

Having had some younger-days fame with a band, Ansel is forging a solo career. While he and Ivy are chatting at a dinner party — she finds him beguiling — he asks for her phone number. When they get together a couple of weeks later at his place, she goes along with “his direct beeline to sex,” and while floating home afterward, she “glanced inside herself for that place where despair usually sat, but couldn’t find it.”

After Ivy doesn’t hear from Ansel for two days, she texts him. She thanks him for the CDs of his music that he gave her at his apartment. He replies with thanks for her “kindnesses.” She hears nothing from him for five days and tries again. His return texts remain unsolicitous — not what she’s fishing for. Several days later he emails her, and they agree on another romp: “She wondered if he found this as surprising and thrilling as she. Oh who cared. It just was.”

Except Ansel isn’t “just” anything to Ivy. Beyond the explosive sex, there’s her wonderment at his ex-jailbird/aspiring-musician persona: “She felt thoroughly frivolous beside this person.” The pattern continues: a frolic and then a lull that leaves Ivy despondent, longing to be as sexually cavalier as Ansel — “Couldn’t she just let it wash over her for once?” By now readers know that she can’t.

Ansel can’t be accused of misrepresenting himself. “I’m starting to get attached to you,” Ivy tells him; “That’s not a good idea,” he says. (The novel’s dialogue is offered, sometimes confusingly, without quotation marks — a longtime Minot preference and one whose payoff for me remains oblique.) On another occasion Ivy says, “I was wondering when a person gets attached to you, what is she supposed to do?”; Ansel tells her that “she should do whatever she wants.” Ivy can call to mind a starstruck schoolgirl, but it would be a mistake to read even peak-obsession Ivy (“She liked him telling her what to do. She liked obeying”) as the Woman Feminism Forgot. While Minot is brave to leave her protagonist open to this interpretation, Ivy is so carefully etched that it should be clear to readers that her lapses are uniquely hers.

Nevertheless, readers’ patience may be strained by Ivy’s infatuation with Ansel. (Her friends’ patience sure is.) So how does “Don’t Be a Stranger” manage not to move readers to send the book flying across the room while screaming “Get a grip, girl!”? For one reason, no one is harder on Ivy than Ivy: “She recognized her fascination with him was romantic, that it was based on little more than instinct, on desire, on something undeveloped in herself.” (There are passages on Ivy’s childhood damage, but gratifyingly, they’re character-expanding rather than explanation-offering.) And then there are Minot’s sentences, which have a marvelous particularity. When Ivy first meets him, “Ansel Fleming felt like a glass hill she was sliding on, trying with an ice axe to find a place to stab and stick.”

Also key: Any story of sexual fixation hinges on convincing readers that the object of obsession has at least some allure, and Minot has created a magnetizing charmer with Ansel, an easy-on-the-eyes guitar-slinging rebel. (I’m picturing a young Steve Earle.) Notably, Ansel seems to have no issue with Ivy’s age, although it niggles at her, especially when she measures herself against the yeasty women in his professional orbit. But maybe Ivy’s age is just a scapegoat for her other insecurities. Had there been no significant age gap between Ivy and Ansel, what’s to say that “Don’t Be a Stranger” wouldn’t have been basically the same lust story?

Nell Beram is coauthor of “Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies.” Her work has recently appeared in “The New Yorker” and at Salon and Shelf Awareness.