First, the good news: Hill has so much talent to burn that he can pull off just about any style, imagine himself into any person and convincingly portray any place or time. “The Nix” is hugely entertaining and unfailingly smart, and the author seems incapable of writing a pedestrian sentence or spinning a boring story. Here is Samuel’s publisher describing his visit to Disney World, in dialogue whose insights, tortured syntax and mash-up of highbrow and vernacular diction could be easily mistaken for a Wallace footnote:

“Every ride, it’s the same conceit: agonizingly slow boat trip through robot wonderland. Like that ride It’s a Small World, which by the way is just a horror of narcotized puppets doing the same rote tasks over and over in what I’m sure Disney totally did not intend to be an accurate and prescient vision of third-world labor.”

Or the description of 11-year-old ­Samuel in an unwanted sexual encounter with Bethany’s brother, who tells him to pretend that he is his sister:

“Bishop pressed into him and Samuel felt that surge that happened so often in class, at his desk, that cascade of tension, that explosive nervous twitching warmth, then looking down, seeing himself rising and swelling, knowing that he should not be rising and swelling but doing it anyway, unstoppably, and how this seemed to clarify things, how it answered something important — about him, about what had happened to him this day — and being absolutely convinced suddenly that everyone knew what he was doing right now.”

There are not many writers outside of Wallace himself elastic enough to voice both the analytical archness of the first passage and the sensitive interiority of the second. But the novel Hill has assembled is so diffuse in its tones, settings and cast that it never gives the reader a chance to plant himself in its emotional soil. As soon as we get to know one character and time period, we are whisked off to another person, decade and mode of expression, often for relatively inconsequential purposes, like a tangent devoted first to the Elfscape addict (through a very “Infinite Jest”-sounding 11-page chapter basically composed of a single sentence) and then the plagiarist, minor players in an already overstuffed ensemble. The relationship between Faye and Samuel, the crux of the novel, doesn’t have the intended payoff, nor does the resolution of Samuel’s longing for Bethany. The strands all converge at the end, but so neatly as to seem more like the elegant solution to a puzzle than an expression of real life.

One gets the sense that Hill wanted to include every anecdote, observation and turn of phrase he ever conjured up or heard, and was loath to prune any from the finished product. Maybe he was also disinclined to write a straightforward, quieter novel for fear — as the publisher says critically of the beginning of Faye’s story that Samuel sends him — of slipping “into some familiar coming-of-age conventions.”

Which is too bad, because Hill is such a gifted and tenderhearted storyteller that “The Nix” doesn’t need these postmodern digressions and gimmicks. When he earnestly explores the fears and desires of humans, whatever conventional familiarity they may have dissolves under his adroit narrative control and nuanced attention to language and psychology.

Then again, if his primary aim was to represent, in all its tragicomic contradictions, the devolution of a country that could conceivably elect Donald J. Trump as its next president, perhaps chaotic, surrealist excess was the only choice to make in this supersize and audacious novel of American misadventure.