It's questionable whether short-story writer Sam Lipsyte actually means for any of the many mysteries of his first novel to be contemplated, let alone solved. From the beginning, he avoids giving readers footholds for their theories, or time to establish them. His first-person protagonist in The Subject Steve supposedly has a terminal disease with no symptoms, let alone a cause. "I'm in fine fettle for a dead man," he repeatedly points out. Still, his doctors insist he's about to die, though of unknown causes and within an uncertain time span. Briefly, those doctors claim he's dying of boredom, purposelessness, and the simple need to be extinct. Later, exposed as quacks, they withdraw the diagnosis, but not the prognosis. Grasping at straws while searching for a cure to his putative ailment, Steve—who also repeatedly points out that his name isn't Steve, although he never suggests any alternative sobriquet—latches on to a frightening, unappealing cult, led by a charmless, torture-happy guru. And so the book goes, as Steve bounces from one group of uncharismatic, cultish outcasts to the next, losing all sense of self-determination in the process. To some degree, The Subject Steve reads like Kafka's The Trial as rewritten by a lazily drunk Kurt Vonnegut; sentenced to death for unknown reasons by impersonally malevolent forces, and doomed to never have his questions answered or even addressed, Steve is forced from place to place, battered and imprisoned, exploited and abused. And yet the tone of the book is quirky, insouciant, almost jaunty. Lipsyte clearly doesn't mean for his readers to worry about "Steve" or feel his pain, even as he's tortured, hospitalized, belittled by his solipsistic daughter, deprived of his only friend, and so forth. At first, his mildly comic situation, along with his snappy, near-absurdist dialogues with unqualified doctors and less-qualified mentors, make The Subject Steve seem like a simple satire. But as the book continues, and its bouncy tone increasingly contradicts its depressing subject matter, Lipsyte's intentions, like his protagonist's character and identity, become more difficult to pin down. He certainly seems to be mocking modern society, religion, egotism, the dot-com industry, and a horde of other easily skewered straw men, but he gives each a quick love tap at most before whisking rapidly on toward his nebulous conclusion. Ultimately, it's hard to find any solid ground in The Subject Steve; like a Rorschach inkblot, the novel may simply represent an abstract but organized pattern whose only real meaning lies in the eye of the beholder.