We speak of great athletes in mythic terms, as heroes or even gods, but the truly Olympian figures in modern professional sports are probably the team owners. They move in realms we can’t understand and to which we have no access. They cause mortals to enact arbitrary contests (the Patriots versus the Dolphins—what does that even mean?) for their own glory and diversion, offering, in return for those mortals’ health and safety, sometimes handsome rewards and sometimes nothing. They watch from skyboxes. Their powers breed in them more impulsiveness than sagacity; they can be hotheaded, lusty, intemperate, and rivalrous, qualities for which their subjects usually pay the price. View more Worthington Gill is the name of the elderly owner of the Dallas Cowboys in the alternate universe of Sergio de la Pava’s third novel, “Lost Empress” (Pantheon). His children, obedient but dim Daniel and rebellious but brilliant Nina, are summoned to his lawyer’s office for a Lear-like premortem division of his estate, wherein Nina does not get the one bequest she wants. She pleads with her brother: transfer ownership of the Cowboys to her, and she will forswear any claim to every other asset in the Gill empire, “your little oil wells and leveraged derivatives or whatever.” His refusal is the beginning of the story rather than its end, for it turns out that, in the way of the obscenely rich, Worthington Gill owned many things that he was not even aware he owned. Nina’s patrimony includes the rights to a failing franchise in the all but defunct Indoor Football League, in the similarly dormant-seeming metropolis of Paterson, New Jersey. When the N.F.L. owners lock out their players for demanding too large a share of the league’s gargantuan revenue, Nina announces that the I.F.L.—with a handful of available players, seemingly no staff, and no TV contract—has been reborn and will start a sixteen-game season in the fall. In the reception area of her father’s lawyer’s office, she collars a delivery girl in a college sweatshirt and then introduces her to the press as the league’s deputy commissioner. The episode is played for laughs, but it is also true that sometimes things are so because people like Nina Gill have the power to make them so. Nina cares little about Paterson’s gritty charms (or, presumably, its extensive literary pedigree), but, when her whim moves her attention there, so, too, moves the action of the novel. The pro-football intrigue with which the story begins is really something of a Shakespearean overlay, a sur-plot, like the wedding of the royals in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” A host of intertwined characters—mostly working class and nonwhite—makes up the novel’s true community and the more self-consciously realistic thread of its narrative. De la Pava’s expansive cast includes priests, 911 operators, criminal-defense lawyers, E.M.T.s, jail guards, single mothers, and fatherless children. It is also salted with the sort of slightly heightened figures for whom their author has a particular fondness, characters who perform mundane jobs with an almost superhuman talent or fervor. There is, for instance, Jorge de Cervantes, a Colombian immigrant who, late in life, discovers in himself a genius for the complicated math and “chessy maneuvering” involved in the flawless running of a Manhattan parking garage. Or Sylvester Scarpetti, the greatest, most intuitive 911-call transcriber in the history of the art, whose ego starts to get the better of him as his reputation spreads. At the other end of the talent spectrum is Travis Mena, an unfortunate emergency-room resident at Bellevue, who is only a doctor at all because his father was one, and whose medical career ends after a disastrous morbidity-and-mortality conference following the death of one of his patients. That patient, as it happens, is Jorge de Cervantes, who, while waiting at a bus stop at the end of his shift, was struck and killed by a car. In truth, there is nothing that Dr. Mena, incompetent though he is, could have done to save Jorge’s life, since he arrived at the E.R. impaled by a metal beam. Still, it is Jorge’s death that draws the novel’s disparate figures into a sort of causal web, as those who knew him try to impose meaning on this random tragedy by turning it into a question of justice, an attempt to name the party or parties responsible and mete out punishment. After the funeral, Jorge’s thirteen-year-old son, Nelson—a boy so sensitive that he titles an essay “Emily Dickinson Is Saving My Life and I Can’t Even Thank Her”—is surrounded by cousins who tell him that he must avenge his father by seeing to it that the driver of the fateful car pay for Jorge’s life with his own. The cousins know just the guy for the job. He is Nuno DeAngeles, and he happens to be incarcerated at Rikers Island at the moment; so is the driver of the car. Nuno awaits trial for a crime that is initially undisclosed but is infamous enough that the other inmates and even the guards recognize his name. Nuno, like Nina, is not conceived as a strictly realistic character. He is more akin to a superhero, an avenging angel. He has no race. He can and does kick the ass of anyone in jail who tries to cross him, but he also demands that his court-appointed lawyer bring him Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” and Sabato’s “The Tunnel”—and “in the original German and Spanish like we agreed because translations are for pussies.” He out-argues a Rikers chaplain on the subject of the Prodigal Son. He files his own brief with the court—reproduced in the novel in its entirety—asking for his indictment to be dismissed on account of centuries of racial prejudice in the form of slavery and the mass incarceration of people of color. In matters large and small, he takes it upon himself to determine, and to administer, justice. The crime of which he is accused turns out to be an absolute epic, a sort of moral and philosophical conundrum worked out through the medium of horrifying violence, confronting real-world genocide with vigilante law.

De la Pava himself can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature. He exists off the literary grid, which is to say that he lives in the real world and has a real job—as a public defender in the criminal courts of Manhattan. He has no M.F.A., no teaching post. The academy hasn’t laid a finger on him. He self-published his first novel, “A Naked Singularity,” in 2008, after eighty-eight agents turned it down. Against all odds, it found a literary audience, and when the University of Chicago Press republished it, in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize as the best début fiction of the year. Undaunted by such recognition, he self-published a second novel as well. “Lost Empress” is his first book under the aegis of a commercial publisher. This outsider status is something of which de la Pava appears to be obliquely proud. The biographical note for “A Naked Singularity” reads, in its entirety, “Sergio de la Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn.” And early in “Lost Empress” (which, in what cannot be a coincidence, is broken into eighty-eight numbered chapters) Nuno delivers a hilariously profane rant against a writer who shows up at Rikers as part of an outreach program. It seems fair to impute at least some of Nuno’s energetic contempt to de la Pava himself: This twee fucker in a vest, the kind of douche who corrects someone calling him a writer by specifying he’s a novelist. Really, fuck? Where can I pick up your intergenerational saga spanning the great panoplic expanse of the world from Connecticut all the way to Wall Street? Or your other one. You know, where the narrator’s marriage dissolves over that one fateful summer in Martha’s Vineyard while her daughter burgeons into womanhood? Fuck off’s what I’m saying. So does de la Pava’s old-school autodidacticism mean that his work is uncontaminated by influence, something new under the literary sun? In most ways no, but in some important and thrilling ways yes. In the context of current American fiction and the directions in which it’s moving, de la Pava can look like a throwback—an unabashed believer in empathy, in gigantism, in the ability of a novel to contain the whole world. (And that means the whole world; one of the novel’s narrative threads traces the growth of a glioblastoma in a character’s brain.) There is more contained in the six hundred and forty pages of “Lost Empress,” formally speaking, than one review can comfortably synopsize. There are, for instance, extended, song-by-song analyses of the œuvre of Joni Mitchell. There is an exhaustive history of the 3-4 defense. The novel incorporates all sorts of documentary-style narration: transcripts of 911 calls, the New York City Department of Correction Inmate Rule Book, legal motions, lectures on the existence and nature of time, even a page of rejected Paterson city mottoes that were part of a failed rebranding effort. Would four or five mottoes have sufficed? Yes, but thirty-three is funnier. The style, of course, is the extraordinary thing, as it would need to be to unite all the elements of a novel of this length and sprawl. It is colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time. If de la Pava has a signature move, it’s to zoom out from a highly specific action or bit of characterization in order to generalize about or extrapolate from it, while still holding on to the speech-replicating sentence structures that ground that action in a kind of conversational specificity: Because it turns out that human reactions to certain mildly complicated activities, like answering 911 calls for a living, disturb in their lack of significant variance. Which explains why someone interacting with an experienced 911 operator will almost certainly be struck by what seems to be their pretty blatant rudeness but is in fact just the gem the activity builds through constant, call-by-call, polish. There are, to be sure, trace elements in “Lost Empress” of David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis and other postmodern giants. What’s unusual—electrifyingly so—is to see this kind of polyphonic, self-conscious literary performance and all-stops-pulled-out postmodernist production value brought to bear on underclass lives, and on questions of social justice that tend not to penetrate the soundproofing of the ivory tower. Within its first few pages, “Lost Empress” describes itself as both “an entertainment” and “a protest,” and that seems about right.

Nina Gill is quite a creation: a charismatic, uncompromising titan who dominates “Lost Empress” even during the long stretches when she is absent. Much of her thread in the novel is rendered on the page screenplay-style, nearly every line a Preston Sturges-worthy wisecrack or pun or both. If she is part vengeful goddess—sending ill-prepared men into dangerous combat in order to spite her handful of peers—she is equally a cheerful amalgam of every screwball-comedy/sports-movie cliché ever. She can outdrink you. She has rejected ten marriage proposals. Despite her heart-stopping beauty, she has a masculine affect; despite her masculine affect, she struggles to be taken seriously by the world of men. She pledges that I.F.L. revenue (should there be any) will go to the players; she has no need of it, anyway. She is always smarter than everyone else in the room, and grotesquely underestimated by the billionaire boys’ club that is the N.F.L. ownership. And so we root for her, even though she is also a ruthless one-per-center with no regard for anyone’s point of view or well-being but her own. We root for her even after we learn that she is aligned with a shadowy criminal syndicate known as the Absence, through which she seeks the theft of an obscure painting by Salvador Dali that languishes in, of all places, the Rikers Island jail complex. (This part of the novel is founded in unlikely fact: Dali really did donate an original painting to Rikers, where it hung for nearly forty years before it was stolen. Though guards were ultimately convicted of the theft, the painting has never been recovered.) “If you want something enough,” Nina explains at one point to her de facto deputy commissioner, “you first have to identify who can procure it, easier today than ever before, then you do something that looks like asking, but a special asking that I admit can become costly.” And therein lies the inevitable connection between the novel’s two poles, Nuno and Nina. For it is Nuno who has been commissioned by the Absence to steal the Dali painting—no mean feat, since it will involve not just obtaining the canvas but then breaking out of Rikers with it. If Nuno can pull this off, he will be free and rich. If he fails, he will be killed. It’s the only time when we see Nuno accept a role as a character in events and not as their architect. The theft of the Dali is in no way a matter of justice. It’s not as though Nina were its rightful owner. She just wants it. But motive isn’t always about free will; sometimes the Nina Gills of the world drive the action, supersede the motivation, in art as in life. Plots themselves are a kind of justice system, whether of the literal or the poetic variety. De la Pava lets all his characters, from the priest to the lawyer to the mourning child, try to put various narrative frames around the suffering they encounter—their own or others’—as a way of making that suffering signify. He does this even as he points out the relativity of “justice” itself: viewed from afar, or, indeed, from up close, all lives pursue the same path and meet the same end anyway. Take the case of the driver who killed Jorge: Let the punishment fit the crime is a thing, right? But with so many blameless people being punished, and severely, worrying about proportionality for this guy seems dumb. The worst things imaginable can happen to this guy for no reason at all without violating any natural law. What then is allowable where such ample justification exists? Why then not allow the universe to dispassionately handle this question of justice? That’s what it does. . . . One needs to adopt, in other words, a particular squint in order to detect the workings of “justice” at all. This accounts, in a philosophical sort of way, for de la Pava’s explicit embrace of the principles of screwball comedy—specifically, its reliance on the idea of coincidence. In a world in which every single horrible outcome eventually can and will happen, how are you going to complain about a plot seeming unlikely?