SOLAR BONES

By Mike McCormack

217 pp. Soho Press. $25.

Modernism was about many things, but largely it was about fragmentation. The world had cracked, and artists had noticed. Virginia Woolf showed what a mess our minds are, Gertrude Stein wrote portraits through a Cubist kaleidoscope, and T. S. Eliot shored fragments against his ruins. Perhaps most famous of all was a certain Irishman with the chutzpah to rewrite the “Odyssey,” turning Odysseus into a middle-aged Jewish cuckold roaming all day through the linguistic detritus of Dublin, his mind a patchwork of scraps. He doesn’t even finish his own story, but is cut off by his wife Molly’s torrential interior monologue, surely literature’s defining instance of “stream of consciousness” and a gloriously fragmented finale to a novel so mashed up and wonderful and horrifying it would be loved and loathed all the way down to the present moment, modernism’s most infamous book.

So when I tell you that a contemporary Irishman has just written a novel with minimal punctuation, recording the stream of consciousness of a man sitting for a few hours at his kitchen table in western Ireland, you might be forgiven for assuming that we are back at the feet of James Joyce, brought here by a modernist apostle, and that you’d do well to wait for the annotated edition. But Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones” (winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker) is a wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary book, with a debt to modernism but up to something all its own.

On Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day (when Catholics pray for the souls in purgatory), the civil engineer Marcus Conway finds himself in his kitchen feeling inexplicably disoriented, as if suddenly untethered from the world. In fact he is dead, a ghost, but he does not realize it. He hears the noontime Angelus bell from across the parish, remembers that his children have grown and moved on, and wonders how he is going to pass the four hours until his wife, Mairead, gets home from work. Finding newspapers on the table, he falls into a pedantic reverie on current events (he is not really a pedant, more a perennial worrier) that spills into thoughts of his life, then stories from his past, one cascading into another. The roughly 200 pages that follow draw together memories of family and work struggles, local and national politics, public works projects, medical crises, art, travel — in short, a life — all of it delivered in lucid, lyrical prose, with line breaks that rarely disrupt but act more like breaths, as if spoken by a friend across the table.

A memory of Marcus’s father disassembling a tractor might turn existential: “as I recoiled at the thought that something so complex and highly achieved as this tractor engine could prove so vulnerable, so easily collapsed and taken apart by this single tool and so frightened was I by this fact it would be years afterwards before I could acknowledge the engineering elegance of it … and