The most expressive part of a camel, it’s been suggested, is its back end. In his memoir “Joseph Anton” — a vastly better book than it’s been given credit for — Salman Rushdie observed that when a camel is upset, its feces change from “dry innocuous pellets to a liquid spray that blasts out a considerable distance behind the aggrieved dromedary.” Like mules, they can really nail you from behind.

Camels play an outsize role in the Serbian-American writer Téa Obreht’s sentimental and meandering second novel, “Inland.” This is the follow-up to her best-selling and critically hailed debut, “The Tiger’s Wife,” which appeared in 2011 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Like the tigers in that previous book, the camels in “Inland” function as creatures of inflated myth and wonder more than they do as complicated mammals with earthly problems of their own. They do not, alas, employ their excretions as social commentary.

But then there’s little well-directed commentary about life, nature, art, ideas or anything much at all in “Inland.” Set in an Old West that feels like a film set, the novel is packed with whimsical “characters” and earnest séances and omens and dowsers and people who talk to the dead. This novel underscores the word “purple” in the patriotic song lyric about “purple mountain majesties.”

Let me pause to say: Obreht has real gifts as a storyteller. “The Tiger’s Wife,” set in the Balkans, was a page-turner that accrued gravitas because of the author’s understanding of that region’s culture and history. (Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985, and moved to the United States in 1997.) With little like that history to cling to, “Inland” floats up and away, like a magic carpet bound for anywhere and nowhere.