Or are they? Remember, nothing is as it seems in “Bottle Grove.” I am a bagatelle, the book declares, without consequence, and without a care that time is scarce and comedy a serious business.

Despite having fallen in love with Padgett, Martin has elaborate no-good plans for her — part of which he jots down on a to-do list for prying, plot-focused eyes to oversee. His baroque machinations involve setting Padgett up with a “titan” (or “tycoon,” or “mogul” — the monikers arrive ironically, yet anxiously) of tech known simply as “the Vic,” a wan Steve Jobs type whose enduring innocuousness makes him an unlikely candidate even for an entry-level coding job. (Yes, perhaps that is the point.) Martin’s goal is to … steal the titan’s money? Secure a loan? That part of the grand plan is never any clearer to the reader than it is to Padgett or, I’d venture, Martin himself. What is clear by this point is that, for Handler, character motivation is a distant second to plot contrivance.

Nothing is believably conjured to life in “Bottle Grove.” No spell is cast, no character takes root in the reader’s heart. Captive to Handler’s cleverness, to his allusive play and lack of rigor, the reader tries to make sense of the proceedings, to no avail. Even as Handler stacks elision upon lacuna to paper over his plot holes and sudden narrative swerves, the whole house of cards grows more absurd, irrelevant, cloying and rickety. What’s worse, many developments follow an old sad sexist script. Padgett is a pawn. She is, among a company of literal “call girls,” pimped out to the titan. That she doesn’t appear to mind is inexplicable. Handler even suggests that this makes her love Martin all the more. Eventually, she marries the Vic. For love? But she loves Martin. For money? But money, in the book’s worldview, is “imaginary and electronic, impossible to grasp because it’s intangible, implausible to steal because it’s just a wisp of a bookmark tucked into a screen.” Tell that to the real temps.

The retrograde narrative arc takes Padgett from an alcoholic bachelorette to a contented wife and mother — but only after an alarming detour through a two-day blackout and probable sexual assault. Reynard the Fox has returned — and it is here that Handler’s bagatelle ceases to be a bagatelle. “Something happens then,” the narrator, gone maddeningly vague, informs us. Padgett comes to “not wearing pants,” there is “a scratch down her leg” and it is “the scariest.” What on earth is a man justly celebrated for the books he writes under the name Lemony Snicket doing playing at rape? I couldn’t determine. One thing is clear: Throughout “Bottle Grove,” he is not in control of his larks and allusions. He’s simply having fun at his characters’ expense, and at the reader’s, too.