It is a time when the books pages are more interested in rounding up the year/century/millennium than assessing new books, but one notable exception has emerged over the past few weeks - Adam Phillips, psychotherapist, writer of elegant little treatises and unlikely media star.

His latest slim volume, Darwin's Worms (Faber, £7.99), sounds like the sort of book that would have difficulty commanding a couple of columns in the Times Literary Supplement, but it has been feted everywhere and its author has been the subject of lengthy interviews in the Observer, Independent on Sunday and Times.

Anna Picard, who interviewed him for the IoS, had problems with the notion of a superstar shrink. "It would be easy to sneer at Adam Phillips, author and celebrity psychoanalyst [sic]", she began. "He thinks big thoughts, writes books either on arcane subjects or on matters accessible but from a highly literary perspective. Oh, and he's rather pretty too. But how do we end up with a celebrity psychoanalyst [sic again]?"

She managed to avoid sneering, but you were left with the impression that it was a frosty session on the couch ("I suppose a ready sense of humour is unlikely in a devotee of Freud," she remarked acidly of his failure to understand her attempt at a joke). All three interviewers were women, and all three emphasised his physical attractions (he has been dubbed the 'shrinking woman's crumpet').

Nicci Gerrard in the Observer referred to "his long hair and his low voice, his disconcerting squint so that he seems to see you twice, and his alluring, open-ended style. He looks like Rufus Sewell crossed with a French Bob Dylan." (Sorry, can't quite visualise that - France could never produce a Bob Dylan.) Catherine O'Brien in the Times was equally smitten: "The dark Byronic curls that frame his face are greying slightly, but he appears otherwise ageless."

There was no problem agreeing that he was a brainy, good-looking bloke, but the pundits had a harder time unravelling the prose. "Phillips is a psychotherapist whose aphoristic books beguile with beautifully resonant prose that doesn't always mean very much," said Andrew Crumey confusingly in the Scotsman, before deciding that Darwin's Worms was "one of his best books yet". (Is it possible to like a book you cannot understand?)

Apart from establishing that this was a book about learning to cope with death and to enjoy life in the knowledge that this is it, reviewers found it difficult to boil down Phillips's ruminations on the legacy of Darwin and Freud to the regulation 800 words. "A précis of Phillips's book would be difficult," said Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian. "It would approximate in length to the original, and it wouldn't be as much fun to read."

Lisa Appignanesi in the Independent had the same problem: "Adam Phillips thinks with his pen, the way few writers can. He is both suggestive and precise... We come away exhilarated, if not altogether able to write the school report (or review) with its conclusion securely in place." (Look, do critics want to review this book or not?)

She did, though, come up with a nice phrase to encapsulate the message of Phillips's book - "finding pleasure in transience". Francis Spufford also enthused, in a beautifully written, tightly argued review in the London Evening Standard. "Darwin's Worms is a moral essay, written to warn us," he said. "In this world in which everything vanishes in the end, and everyone eventually has losses to mourn, the great temptation, says Adam Phillips, is to seize on mourning itself as the one permanent thing, and to try to use regret to stop time."

Spufford's review is so good that, as with the book, it is difficult to quote from it. There seems to be a general problem here with mediation, which may not be a bad thing. For once, we really will have to read the book instead.