Stargell, the 29-year-old narrator of Craig Nova's Incandescence, is a man of intelligence. Perhaps even genius. He once worked as an inventor at one of those high-powered think tanks but was fired after spending half a million dollars on a project to extract oil from the wing joints of moths….

So when the story opens, we find Stargell a down-and-out taxi hack in New York. He's broke. He's on the skids. He lives—survives—in a dingy three-room apartment…. A long, dizzying fall from the think-tank heights. And, in the course of this novel, a sad predicament gets even sadder. Partly in horror, partly in puzzlement, we watch as Stargell makes some zany but essentially halfhearted efforts to pull himself out of this mess. Alas, he only manages to descend deeper into darkness.

What are we to make of this inventor, one who seemingly can't invent solutions to...