In Jesse Ball’s elegant, spellbinding fifth novel, “A Cure for Suicide,” a man known only as the “claimant” sits on a chair, which he has recently learned is called “chair.” He listens as a woman he knows as the “examiner” tells him how a story works. The examiner has not yet given the claimant a name. The claimant must first learn how to listen to a story and tell a story in turn. “It isn’t important that you understand what I say,” the examiner tells him. “It is not very important that you are understood as long as you give the person the happiness of being told a story.”

The claimant’s story is this: He was very ill, in fact almost died, and has been brought here to recover. In this village the houses all look the same, inside and out, and the claimant can be moved to a new house in his sleep at any time. The examiner is the only person the claimant ­interacts with. Steadily, the claimant learns the mechanisms of daily living: eating, dressing, going for walks, conversing. He is ­given a name. He learns to draw. He learns about crying. He has no memory of his life before this, but he cries out for someone in his sleep. His drawings are disturbing.

One day, the examiner brings the claimant to a party where he meets a woman named Hilda, who comes to inhabit his every waking thought. At a dinner, Hilda asks to meet him in secret, and in secret, she tells him that the village isn’t what it seems. The examiners aren’t who they say they are. In fact, Hilda and the claimant are both in danger. She shows him proof. The claimant learns about distrust. She tells him to meet her the following night so they can escape together. The following night comes, but the claimant doesn’t meet her. He hesitates and stays put, and Hilda is taken. He learns about regret.

With the simplicity of a fable and the drama of a psychological thriller, Ball tells a story about starting over from nothing, reconstructing life from its most basic elements. These acts of narrative deconstruction highlight his strength as a deeply questioning writer at home in fact as much as abstraction. In the ­village’s cemetery, Ball deconstructs death. Noting that gravestones are “irrational” because they prolong suffering while failing to bring back the dead, the claimant wonders: “But, if life is just that, just being reasonable, then there is nothing in it — nothing worthwhile. So, the yearning that we have to keep dead things living — or to make unreasonable things reasonable. That is why a person should live.”