The world of “The Heart Goes Last” starts out feeling familiarly post-­apocalyptic: a destitute married couple, Charmaine and Stan, drift across a devastated landscape, forced to sleep in their car as roving bandits threaten attack each night. As the story expands, we see the novel’s reality is even more disturbing: This is not a different universe, just a slightly exaggerated version of our own. A world where the working class has been pushed off the edge of the economic cliff, and the middle-class dream is alive only as a living nightmare. One of the last sustainable industries is the prison system. “Prisons used to be about punishment, and then reform and penitence, and then keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then, for quite a few decades, they were about crowd control — penning up the young, aggressive, marginalized guys to keep them off the streets. And then, when they started to be run as private businesses, they were about the profit margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers and the hired guards and so forth.”

The Positron Project is an attempt to remedy this, a utopian solution for a dystopian world. If prisons are a surefire way to make money, why not create a town that thrives because its residents serve as its prisoners? “Since it was unrealistic to expect certified criminality from 50 percent of the population, the fair thing would be for everyone to take turns: one month in, one month out. Think of the savings, with every dwelling serving two sets of residents! It was time-share taken to its logical conclusion.”

Living in cramped cells while being subsidized by the state and their own free labor, residents can finally afford a piece of the lifestyle they’ve been taught to desire: safe, quaint houses, full employment, TVs and radios that play only programming from the 1950s with its postwar embrace of quiet order.

Charmaine and Stan, out of options, or at least of upwardly mobile ones, enlist eagerly, before they even know the surreal scope of the Positron plan. For Stan, the seduction is the opportunity for employment, to be a provider in his marriage again as opposed to the dependent he’s become. For Charmaine, it’s the siren call of Disneyworld-esque small-town living and the security that implies. They agree to join, the first of several failures of the couple in the war against desire. Soon they are indeed imprisoned, but in ways even more personal and traumatic than they had imagined.