In all these plot-rich incidents, and in scores more, Gass appears to be a straightforward sympathetic psychological storyteller, despite a hovering nimbus of things awry; of flaw and fraud. But soon enough a wilderness intrudes: the tender and aspiring young Joey, immersed in books and music, living with his mother after his sister has gone off to marry a potato farmer, is revealed to be an obsessive, a secret prevaricator who will always be living with his mother. In middle-C Ohio he is a diabolus in musica, a discordant and anomalous note. What seizes Joseph Skizzen (who will, under false colors, become Professor Skizzen, Whittlebauer College’s published and respected professor of music), what claws at his brain, are the pullulations of all the world’s evils. Indefatigably, he collects newspaper clippings of global catastrophes, from tribal animosities to sex crimes and genital deformations, from H.I.V. and Holocaust atrocities and the burning of the Library of Alexandria to mudslides and tornadoes and capsized ferries. Taint and trauma and torment. His scissors is his rake, and he heaps up these jumbles of horror in what he calls his Inhumanity Museum. He sees how pain and wickedness fructify, even as his mother’s increasing skills proliferate into the busy contradictions of a garden teeming with blooms and larval infestation. He is like the man in the fairy tale whose sight is so powerful that he must bind his eyes with a blindfold lest he see too unbearably much: every droplet on every leaf, every particle of foam in every sea, every wound in every heart; only Joseph Skizzen’s eyes are unbound, and every drop is shed blood.

Nor is this the whole of his obsession. Growing parallel with his museum of cuttings, Skizzen’s forgeries, and his misgivings, multiply. His academic credentials, his college degree and his doctorate, and his music studies in Vienna, are all fakes and inventions. Like his father before him, he seems to be what he is not. And his unrelenting aim is to crush into a single sentence God’s crucial query over the fate of the cities of the plain — ought humanity, so inhumane, to endure? An elusive sentence, which he works over and over again, shaping and reshaping it, until it can fit, just so, into 12 spare words.