Miller’s first novel, the brilliantly absurd “The Last Days of California,” relayed the story of a zealous Alabama family taking a road trip to the rapture. In her follow-up effort, she tackles the story of Louis McDonald Jr., a splenetic, divorced 63-year-old Mississippi slob who has cavalierly quit his job in the expectation of a big inheritance that may not be coming. One day he impulsively stops at a house offering “free dogs” and adopts grumpy mixed-breed Layla, to whom he vents his pique as he tosses her slices of bologna on the kitchen floor.

Louis’s mind is a leaking sieve of grievance that yields bitterness toward his ex-wife, indifference to his daughter and the affronted conviction that people should just leave him the hell alone. You can almost feel him melding into his lounge chair as he absently watches Fox News, lusts for a neighbor’s wife and gorges on Doritos. But he’s a human car crash you have to pull over and watch. His life, a hamster wheel of grotesque food (his diet consists of chain restaurant leftovers, along with pancakes and Pepsi at the local IHOP), dog turds, sloth and grudges, somehow manages to elicit empathy. Because at some point haven’t we all sat snacking and staring aimlessly at the television, convinced that no one loves us?

Miller is a master of deadpan observation (“There was simply too much information available in the world and I missed living in a state of ignorance without having to apologize for it”), and the result is a novel that’s insightful, sad, touching and also deeply uncomfortable — a biography of the love child of Eleanor Rigby and George Costanza. Unfortunately, Miller can’t resist the impulse to tie Louis’s messy tangle of woebegone threads into a tidy, mawkish bow. His hasty epiphany in the final pages feels like just another piece of bologna tossed on the kitchen floor.