A brash, brooding novel that twists a postmodern narrative into a rumination on the doomed glory of old-world metafiction, In The Hand Of Dante bears the distinctly forceful stamp of Nick Tosches. As the author of searching books about Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Liston, and Dean Martin, Tosches has developed a cult around his image as a dapper and dirty truth-seeker who wrestles with wrecked men while romancing the ladies with poetry and street-smart soul. He does all that and more with uneven returns in his new novel, both as its author and as a central character whose lifelong obsession with Dante Alighieri comes to fruition when gangsters have him help unload an original manuscript of The Divine Comedy on the black market. In The Hand Of Dante opens with a grizzled crime-world lackey wiping "residue" off his hand after an affair with a hooker, starting at the earthy end of a narrative that cycles through the seedy realities and "illimitable" aspirations that tug at the souls of humankind. Hearty enough to make Hemingway a sissy by comparison, the character "Nick Tosches" first appears as a writer decrying his lot as an "AOL Time Warner product" and swimming with barracudas in Cuba, where he contracts the gangrene that will put him face-to-face with death. His world intertwines with the criminals' when his Greenwich Village neighbors luck upon a manuscript in Dante's original hand, discovered by a lapsed Italian priest who filters his unfulfillable sexual desires into his love for books. With all the pieces in place for meditations on poetry, truth, lies, faith, and reason, Tosches sets off on alternately rich and bloated riffs that shift between the broads-and-tits dialogue of hardened gangsters and the period-faithful poetics of God-fearing classicists. A good bit of the book reaches towering heights, with Tosches winding a singular path around the metaphysical mysteries of Paul Auster and the purge-and-learn frankness of Philip Roth. But an equal amount feels less than fully realized, including a number of jarring plot points and an already-infamous 20-page screed against the publishing industry. The rant makes a bit of sense, as it bears out a psychological portrait of Dante that dominates the novel, but Tosches' tough-hewn digressions stream like hose blasts in a book more prone to gently lap against the shores of the unknowable. For all of its chest-pounding yawps and pulpy airs, In The Hand Of Dante focuses primarily on profound questions of life, death, and the religious divisions that govern so much of both. As the gritty realist and dying dreamer at the book's core, Tosches spends an impressive amount of time staring at the sun, even if he inspires some eye-rolling along the way.