我承认一些混乱的时机e publication of “I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home,” Lorrie Moore’s first novel in more than a decade. In the popular imagination, summer reading is like summer dining: fresh, lightweight, juicy and languorous, a beach romance mixed with a zippy thriller and a side of high-end theft.

And yet here comes “I Am Homeless,” lumbering toward us on the sand, as dense and heavy as an elephant seal. The story, such as there is one, goes something like this: A lonely, conspiracy-minded teacher named Finn arrives in New York to visit his brother Max, who is dying of cancer. Alas, his filial duties are soon interrupted by an ominous text. Lily, Finn’s depressive ex-girlfriend and a therapy clown, has taken her own life after multiple attempts.

丧,芬恩让麦克斯的床边并返回Illinois, only to discover Lily herself in the cemetery, dressed in a shroud and clown shoes and with a mouth full of dirt. She’s not alive, but she’s not dead-dead. Finn metabolizes this information quickly, as only a conspiracy theorist can. Before long they’ve set off on a road trip to Lily’s preferred burial spot, a body farm in Knoxville, Tenn., where anthropologists study decomposition.

Along the way, true to road trip form, Finn and Lily crack dark jokes, rehash old arguments, buy gas station snacks and have sex in the driver’s seat. The only problem with getting back together is that Lily keeps disintegrating. She needs a bath, badly. To freshen her up, Finn books a room at a mysterious B&B along the Mason-Dixon Line, where Finn discovers a sheaf of old letters. The letters, addressed to a dead sister, unlock the novel’s semi-baffling subplot, which involves a notorious assassin long rumored dead and a gently murderous innkeeper. Finn steals these letters the way he stole Lily from the cemetery: It was wrong, but Lord, it felt so right.

I’m tempted to spoil the end of“I Am Homeless,” because its plot is kind of beside the point. It’s not like “Hamlet” is ruined if you know it ends in a bloodbath. And Moore, like Shakespeare, is an indisputable genius, her sentences routinely sublime. Here’s one of my favorites, a moment where Finn gazes at Max’s blank, dying face: “It made him briefly homesick for their childhood together: that feeling of being in your flip-flops and swimsuits on a hot asphalt parking lot at the supermarket, waiting for your mother to hurry up.” With images like this, one feels the jokey braininess of Moore’s prose relax and give way to a huge, beat-up heart.

Yet maybe the problem with geniuses — I’m only guessing here — is that what seems perfectly clear to them remains inscrutable to everyone else. The word gnomic kept coming to mind as I read “I Am Homeless,” as if the novel were wrapped by Lily’s death shroud, rendering it opaque. Why are we reading letters from a 19th century innkeeper again? Why exactly does the narrative forget about Max after 60 pages? And are these shrewd questions to ask, or are these the questions of an amateur, tugging at the master’s hem?

One of the novel’s epigraphs, from Canadian writer Sheila Heti, offers a clue to Moore’s answer:

“Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.” Moore’s reputation is built on her short stories, which have been widely lauded, anthologized and taught in creative writing classrooms for decades. Her novels, then, are maybe like Stephen King’s rock band — a side hustle, with somewhat less skill and ego, where unquenched passions can go, sense be damned. She knows the form’s high-water mark was a while back, but she can’t help herself.

Or maybe it’s that grief, which seeps from Moore’s pages here like wet ink, is always nonsensical to those outside it. Maybe “I Am Homeless” is not meant to be read as a novel, but as a death dream, a Book of Job, a 200-page wail. Taken on these terms, the project is a triumph, especially as characters stumble into something like transcendence. “This is life!” Finn tells Lily. “It’s not f—ing perfect. It’s not even all that great. But it is the only living part you’ve got and yes it’s a mixed bag!”

How touching these exhortations. How odd to read them while eating strawberries in June. But I suppose genius has never paid attention to publishing schedules — or for that matter, newspaper reviews.

Sally Franson is a freelance writer.