While the compiling of the Grand Report lends the novel some semblance of an arc, plot here is thin even by McCarthy’s standards. (“Events!” U. warns us early on. “If you want those you’d best stop reading now.”) There’s a storyline about a friend dying of thyroid cancer, a budding romance with a woman named Madison who’s withholding a tantalizing secret, and a growing fixation with what appears to be a global epidemic of parachuting mishaps. But these elements exist largely, it seems, to stock U. with a fresh supply of fodder to metabolize into anthropological insight.

U. is a familiar McCarthy narrator, affectless and cut off, who’s nevertheless haunted by a sympathetic longing for knowledge. Holed up in the purgatorial bowels of his office building, he listens to voices carrying through the ventilation shafts and ponders scraps of miscellaneous information pinned to corkboards. He dreams of the second coming of a messianic polymath like Leibniz who will reconcile the disciplines and derive the grand unified theory of everything. In the meantime, he tries to do it himself, seeking, “the plan, formula, solution—not only to the problem with which I was currently grappling, but to it all, the whole caboodle.” Everything from bungee jumping in Vanuatu to the Turin Shroud to rave culture to ripped jeans begins to intertwine in the hothouse of his mind.

As the novel progresses, interweaving scenes and dreams, events and their imagined reenactions, it pulls into its orbit an ever-expanding constellation of symbols—oil spills, buffering pixels, parachutes. These recur routinely, shuffling and fusing and taking on new meanings in a restless, recombinant process of free association. Before long, the reading experience comes to feel analogous to U.’s own quest as he broods over his “wallpaper fragments," with “parities and conjunctions appearing between contents that, on the surface of things, had nothing in common.” As if to drive home the parallels between the reader and U.’s analytical task, the novel is divided into individually numbered paragraphs, like notecards (or, tellingly, like bible chapters or Nietszchean aphorisms.)

Early on, U. relates how his hero, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, once lamented that as soon as he’d come to understand the complexities of a primitive tribe, “the mystery that drew the anthropologist to his subject in the first place vanishes.” Consequently, Lévi-Strauss mused that the ideal tribe as a subject of study was one that flickered perpetually between transparency and total incomprehensibility—one that retained an impenetrable core of mystery, preventing it from ever growing banal.

This, McCarthy seems to imply, is a prescription for avoiding the deadening of experience in the age of mechanical reproduction, one of the book’s central preoccupations—a prescription of which this novel itself is the artistic proof of concept. Like Strauss’s ideal tribe, Satin Island hovers between the alien and the familiar, packaging experimental literature in a candy coating of easily digestible (and often slyly funny) narrative. Nevertheless, it retains, thanks to the self-referential enigma of its symbols, a certain inexhaustibility, creating a wheel of internal linkages that one might spend a lifetime attempting to unpack.