It’s poor form, probably, to insert a long quote this early in a review. Yet this drifting sentence, from Page 114, is representative of Burns’s narrative voice — the repetitions, the piling up of extraneous detail, the dashes within dashes, the sense she instills in her readers of craving verbs the way an animal craves salt:

“No matter the reservations held then — as to methods and morals and about the various groupings that came into operation or which from the outset already had been in operation; no matter too, that for us, in our community, on ‘our side of the road,’ the government here was the enemy, and the police here was the enemy, and the government ‘over there’ was the enemy, and the soldiers from ‘over there’ were the enemy, and the defender-paramilitaries from ‘over the road’ were the enemy and, by extension — thanks to suspicion and history and paranoia — the hospital, the electricity board, the gas board, the water board, the school board, telephone people and anybody wearing a uniform or garments easily to be mistaken for a uniform also were the enemy, and where we were viewed in our turn by our enemies as the enemy — in those dark days, which were the extreme of days, if we hadn’t had the renouncers as our underground buffer between us and this overwhelming and combined enemy, who else, in all the world, would we have had?”

T.S. Eliot said of another difficult novel, Djuna Barnes’s “Nightwood” (1936), “Only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” After “Ulysses” and “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Sound and the Fury” and innumerable other novels, we have eyes for the poetry in a novel like “Milkman,” but an attentive reader will spend days between stations while searching for it. So many of the passages spin like the one above.

The best thing in “Milkman” is Burns’s occasionally sensitive portrait of this young woman’s flickering consciousness. She reads only old books; she wants to escape the 20th century and the horrors around her. Books help her remain alive but also remote from her hazardous world, the world not just of politics but of sex. “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”

She isn’t sure what kind of woman she wants to be, nor what kind of man she desires. The Milkman is all menace and muscle; her almost-boyfriend is too sensitive, too fey.

When she wants to be, Burns is bleakly funny. The narrator reads her much-younger siblings “The Exorcist” and “Doctor Faustus” before bed. One character goes to the Middle East to get a bit of peace.

Sometimes her pile-on sentences achieve a prickly, shambolic sort of grace. Here she is on black days: “She meant depressions, for da had had them: big, massive, scudding, whopping, black-cloud, infectious, crow, raven, jackdaw, coffin-upon-coffin, catacomb-upon-catacomb, skeletons-upon-skulls-upon-bones crawling along the ground to the grave type of depressions.”