SAMUEL TAYLOR’S LAST NIGHT

By Joe Amato

Dalkey Archive, paper, $15.95.

Amato has written a grab bag of a novel, a collage of stories, memories, cultural critiques, anaphoric lists, pasta recipes and so on. The central character is also the book’s composer, a disgruntled academic avant-garde writer halfway through a career of “tenure-track failures” who sets out to write a novel (this one) that challenges literary convention, as if to revitalize his life through writing.

If the style is strange, the theme is familiar: At a certain age, a writer seeks to regain the anarchic freedom of art. It’s Vonnegut at the start of “Breakfast of Champions” drawing an anus (it looks like an asterisk) to announce that, having reached his 50th year, he will write whatever he damn well pleases. Or it’s Gilbert Sorrentino in “Little Casino” (a collage-novel that Amato’s stylistically resembles), throwing open the imagination’s windows to let in new air. But Amato lacks Vonnegut’s wit and Sorrentino’s intellectual authority, and the bulk of “Samuel Taylor’s Last Night” comes off more random than rebellious. When the dust settles — about two-thirds in — what emerges is a convincing portrait of a man filled with moral conviction whose career has stranded him at the bottom of the ladder. There are moments here when Amato’s view of the underside of academia offers something unexpected, but overall “Samuel Taylor” the novel, like Samuel Taylor the character, seems lost, crowded with conviction but unsure what to do with it.

THE INFERNAL

By Mark Doten

Graywolf, paper, $18.

Doten’s debut is the most audaciously imaginative political novel I’ve ever read. It’s also very “literary,” though couched in a sci-fi premise: In an alternate reality, a Christ figure (“the Akkad boy”) has been attached to an information-extracting machine (“the Omnosyne”) that will feed his soul (“information”) into “the Cloud.” We are to be presented with transcriptions of the stories that have poured out of this boy over the course of a four-day interrogation. But it turns out that he speaks in other people’s voices — voices from our own reality — and what we actually get is a burlesque of monologues and stories that rewrite our own fraught cultural narratives.

Most of these pieces are too weird to be easily described. Osama bin Laden tells us about feeding his followers into the mouth of a mechanical bird. Dick Cheney learns to love himself. Mark Zuckerberg tries to survive an eschatological video game. “Mark Doten” discusses race politics with Barack Obama — along with about 10 other story lines by characters famous and not. They are by turns hilarious and disturbing, often shifting into surrealism or Kafka-style absurdity. There are traces of Beckett’s influence, and David Foster Wallace’s, and, perhaps most obviously, of Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning,” but overall the sheer poundage of originality is remarkable.