Paul's fall from grace can be attributed to a single fact: He is a louse. He blew his academic career when he got caught cheating on his rising-star professor wife. Then the grad student he two-timed with left him for a TV weatherman, and two other women he was juggling found out about each other. Then he lost his job at a textbook publisher when he was discovered dropping racy literary allusions like "Vita showed Virginia a thing or two" into grammar exercises to mock his ill-read supervisor. He has hit bottom. And to top it off, he's being haunted by his ex-wife's dead cat, a phantom that bites his toes in the middle of the night, restricts his TV reception to cat-related programming, and stinks up his apartment with spectral piss.

Hynes' previous novels have been academic satires, and at a time when postdocs and adjuncts are forced to flee the shriveled university job market, "Kings of Infinite Space" almost belongs in that category, too. Paul all too believably clings to his education as the last, flimsy shred of superiority he can claim over his co-workers, even the pretty mailroom staffer he discovers poring over the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" in the cafeteria. But the final challenge to Paul's battered ego and chronic selfishness comes from a strange, pasty, Dilbert-like homeless guy who keeps popping up in unlikely places asking, "Are we not men?" and from a bunch of good ol' boys from the office who manage to get a lot done without actually working. There are strange noises coming from behind the ceiling panels, Post-it notes that appear out of nowhere, and an aluminum-can recycling bin that periodically becomes bottomless. Something weird is going on at TxDoGs.

It gets a lot weirder, too, with secret societies and subterranean grottos, but bizarre as the main plot gets, Hynes keeps one foot on the ground. There's a delicate romance kindled between Paul and Callie the mail girl, and some wicked philosophizing occasioned by a visit to a Hooters-style restaurant by the guys at the office. The big mystery, really, is whether Paul will ever grasp what a jerk he's been and take a few halting steps in the general direction of decency. Years spent reading the cream of English literature couldn't achieve such an enlightenment, but if a cannibal cult and some major turnover at the Texas Department of General Services can pull it off, that's all in a day's work.

-- Laura Miller

art

"The Jane Austen Book Club"
By Karen Joy Fowler
304 pages
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Order from Powells.com

Any novel titled "The Jane Austen Book Club" has enough intimations of tweeness without some reviewer making matters worse by calling it civilized. But there's no escaping the adjective in describing Karen Joy Fowler's novel. It's not the thought of Jane Austen that might make some of us flee from what sounds like an unbearably homey premise -- a group of women and one man in Central California meeting to discuss the novels of Jane Austen. It's what some people have done with Austen, ignoring her sharpness and turning her into the literary equivalent of warm milk. Fowler, to her credit, has instead made a perfect glass of lemonade; every time you fear the concoction is turning too sweet, there's a trace of tartness to keep things in balance.

You can read "The Jane Austen Book Club" for that balanced and sustained tone, or you can admire the book as a piece of comic structure so firm yet so submerged that it isn't fully apparent until the end. Each chapter, in which the members of the club meet at someone's house to discuss one of Austen's novels, is Fowler's jumping-off point for the backstory of that meeting's host. These funny, shrewdly observed and sometimes surprisingly wounding segments might form a first-rate short-story collection (that is, if Fowler often didn't leave you wanting more). But like her beloved Austen, Fowler uses the seemingly self-contained stories to lay the groundwork for the characters to form new alliances. When those alliances become clear, the effect is akin to seeing someone choreograph a comic ballet merely by twirling her fingers.

I must confess that part of the pleasure I took in "The Jane Austen Book Club" is because I've almost entirely given up on contemporary literary comedy. There are plenty of novelists who can make me laugh -- but usually not the ones who are called comic novelists. Their comedy seems to require a fondness for coyness, or magic realism rendered as deadpan absurdist farce, or just pomo wiseass showing off. Just reading the flap copy exhausts me.

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