At thirty-six, Cohen is one of the most prodigious stylists in American fiction. Illustration by Keith Negley

As a form, the novel can never decide quite how stylish it should be. Is it a mirror or a music, a camera or a painting? Is it best designed for the long haul or for fine circular flights? Is it where we make a fetish of the perfect sentence, or a more relaxed religion of the appropriate form? Nabokov liked to dismiss writers who failed the Nabokovian sentence test, such as Camus, Mann, and Stendhal (who indeed likened the novel to a mirror). But the novelist ideally writes in paragraphs and chapters, not in sentences, as Woolf reminded her readers. Novelistic form, the accretion of many sentences, must find its own deeper, slower rhythm. In this regard, Iris Murdoch once divided the twentieth-century novel into the journalistic and the crystalline, and Woolf, the modernist aesthete who also loved Dickens and Scott and Tolstoy, couldn’t quite decide whether she liked her novels hospitably journalistic or stylishly crystalline. Like many of us, she wanted different pleasures from different novelists.

Joshua Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today. (And he is only thirty-six.) At his best, he resembles Saul Bellow: his sentences are all-season journeyers, able to do everything everywhere at once. He can be witty, slangy, lyrical, ironic, vivid; he possesses leaping powers of metaphor and analogy. Most writers develop certain talents at the expense of others, but Cohen relishes verbs as much as adjectives, metaphor-making as much as epigram-minting. Style is a patent priority: his fiction displays the stretch marks of its originality. In his new novel, “Moving Kings” (Random House), there are wonderfully strange verbs. In a cab: “The driver rancored away in Arabic, to himself or just a specter.” At a party: “A girl brisked over.” There are interesting new adjectives (or nouns turned into adjectives): “A hypermarket, a pharmacy, a dun huttish structure topped with a blinking red neon star.” And precise metaphorical descriptions, like this one of traffic in Queens: “He turned onto Northern Boulevard heading south. The cars seeped like spread tar and hardened into traffic.” Or the heat in Mexico: “The sun was sowing him a migraine.” But even when Cohen is not putting out his flags the prose is alert, tense with vitality. Here David King, newly arrived in Israel, prepares to meet his cousins: “The next morning, the second day—the day that God divided the sky from the waters below and so created the conditions for jetlag—David’s cousins were waiting in the lobby.”

Cohen is, in fact, a crystalline novelist with a journalistic openness to the world; his stylish sentences are loaded with the refuse of the real, with the facts, social data, and informational surplus of postmodernity. In this will to supreme combination, he resembles Thomas Pynchon (with Joyce the blessed progenitor), or David Foster Wallace. Cohen’s previous novel, the massive and massively ambitious “Book of Numbers” (2015), marched, in seven-league boots, over vast terrain: comparative theology, postmodern philosophy, questions of contemporary gender, the monstrous complacencies of the Internet age. As in Wallace’s work, there is a recognizable tension between the priority of style and the boisterous claims of the world, a tension as old as realism itself.

There are moments in Cohen’s work when his worldly omnivorousness (the desire to cover everything) and his stylistic talents (the desire to cover everything in the most brilliant style) seem to be running a race with each other. “Book of Numbers” was sometimes hard to read, not because it was incomprehensible or too demanding but because its textures were overwhelming, and because it struggled to find a form that could contain and focus those textures. Cohen’s natural inclination is toward a loquacious, storytelling largesse, but each of his sentences is also a micro-adventure in abundance. Here, in his new novel, he sketches some of the guys who work for David King’s company, King’s Moving. Each brief portrait is a stuffed pantechnicon:

Gyorgi had worked as a mover until he’d touched a female minor who’d clerked at a gypsum sheather in Paterson, served most of a lenient sentence, and was now confined behind a storage cage to be more findable by his parole officer. . . . Ronaldo Rodriguez, AKA Ronriguez, AKA Godriguez, AKA Burrito Ron, earned the last of his nicknames pioneering the technique of taking a customer’s odd loose possessions and rolling them up in a rug for efficiency of transport. He was a squat wide-assed low center of gravity surmounted by a slick pubic moustache. Malcom C, alias Talcum X, powdered his pits to stay dry and his hands to improve his grip. He was bullet bald and jacked, with two additional adductor muscles found in only .006% of the population.

“Moving Kings” also struggles with form, but this may represent a conscious effort on the author’s part at self-contraception. It is relatively brief (two hundred and forty pages), accessible, and more or less conventionally structured; it is highly intelligent but not a novel of ideas, and though its prose does plenty of swaggering, the swagger belongs to the characters—which is to say, most of the novel is written in close third-person or free indirect style, the grammar of everyday contemporary realism. It’s the right style for this novel’s world, which is burly with particularities and vibrant with voice. The atmosphere at times resembles a Jewish “Sopranos,” minus the violence—men, family, moneymaking, muscle. David King, the son of a Jewish immigrant and Holocaust survivor, reared in Queens, owns a successful moving company with storage facilities in all five boroughs. We first encounter him at a fancy fund-raiser in the Hamptons, where he stands out like a sweating cart horse among dry Arabians—bigger, coarser, burdened by work and apprehensions of work: “He moved among the servers who made $8.75 an hour and so who made about 14 cents, 14.5833 cents, he did the figures in his head, for each minute it took them to carve him primerib or fix him a scotch or direct him and his menthols to a smoking area.”