“Book of Numbers” is Mr. Cohen’s fourth novel; he has also written several books of stories. When I remark that his prose recalls Mr. Roth’s, what I mean is that he blends slashing comedy with a brooding awareness of family, of the Old World, of prior claims on his soul.

Image Joshua Cohen Credit... Beowulf Sheehan

He is very fine on those determined mothers, bound for Manhattan, who “drive the family up 440 N across all of Staten Island for culture, for chemo.” He nails the “smilingly wisenheimer outtaboro accent of an animated knish cart in a popular afterschool cartoon series.”

The narrator spends a lot of time in the Metropolitan Museum, where he stares at ancient buxom statuettes that his mother has begun to emulate in her own art. “That’s what Moms’s lady statuettes are technically called — steatopygi, or steatopygia,” he writes. “Thrombosed bulges, throbbing clots — my mother’s hindquarter was always a veiny maze, a varicose labyrinth, though not just hers: weighty were the bases of all the women in my family, my mother’s family. My grandmother, my greatgrandmother, every aunt and cousin — Holocaust fodder. Heavy Jewesses, thickly rooted Jewesses, each swinging a single pendulous braid.”

Like Wallace, Mr. Cohen is blazingly learned; his mind seems to have a dozen tabs open at any one time. He is good on topics as varied as poker, entropy, bespoke cocktails and art. He is as incapable of writing a boring sentence as Dean Moriarty, in “On the Road,” is incapable of yawning or saying a commonplace thing.

Here he is on reading an e-book on a train: “To turn the page, to turn the screen page of their tablet devices, they made a slight slash with the index finger, like how tyrants used to select their concubines and condemn their jesters to death. Stroke, off with her clothes. Stroke, off with his head.”

Like Wallace, too, Mr. Cohen wears his intellect casually, perpetually untucked, and he has a gift for cracked aphorism. You move through this book and find a steady patter of observations like: “Death is the only monopoly”; “No fact ever contradicted a tree”; “Genocide, like publishing, is 66.6 percent a problem of distribution”; “What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss”; “Respect thy parents even unto their proxy reputations.”

“Book of Numbers” is polyphonic. The most prominent voice, after the narrator’s own, belongs to the billionaire. This novel’s long center section, almost a novel inside a novel, is the hectic transcription of an extended interview between the two Joshes.