The title of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s stunning new novel, “The Harder They Come,” refers less to the Jimmy Cliff movie than to a D. H. Lawrence observation quoted at the beginning of the book: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

An equally fitting epigraph for Mr. Boyle’s tale of rage and madness and Oedipal conflict might have come from Philip Roth’s 1997 classic, “American Pastoral,” which contrasted the optimistic strain of Emersonian self-reliance in the American character with “the fury, the violence, and the desperation” of “the indigenous American berserk.”

“The Harder They Come” often seems like a homage to that Roth novel — it too is about the dark side of the American dream, and the efforts of a father to come to terms with a violent child wanted by the law. At the same time, it recapitulates themes that have preoccupied Mr. Boyle throughout his long career: his fascination with characters who pit themselves against their neighbors, the system and nature; freedom as both a founding principle of America — and an invitation to rebellion and self-indulgence; and the dark fallout of ideological certainty and obsession.

Over the years, the antic satire and Grand Guignol hyperbole of Mr. Boyle’s early work — like “World’s End,” “East Is East” and “Budding Prospects” — have given way to a more modulated approach. In the case of “The Inner Circle” (about the sexologist Alfred Kinsey) and “The Women” (about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright), this led to some tepid writing and cartoony characters. But when Mr. Boyle found a way to balance his taste for exaggeration with a more naturalistic style, his caffeinated energy with introspection, the result has been deeper, more emotionally affecting works. “A Friend of the Earth” and “Drop City” demonstrated that he could do it all — comedy and compassion, psychologically vivid characters combined with big ideas about America and the American dream.