(“Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired,” runs the novel’s epigraph, taken from John Carpenter’s movie “The Thing.”) Though Ricky Rice, with his heavy life baggage, is less of a cipher than the typical Murakami narrator, there is that sense of the protagonist as somnambulist, stumbling across haunting artifacts, trying to make connections. The vibe is similar: One odd encounter leads to another, with a phantasmal logic often laced with humor, the whole thing building up to a sort of monumental dreamwork. This is not to suggest the sentences don’t have snap, just that they’re compact - more toward the noir end of the dial, away from a more overtly lyrical or maximal style - it’s comparable to the voice in some of Haruki Murakami’s novels. That “like” is perfect - a modest verb in place of the chest-thumping “love.” For a book with a dazzling array of flashy moving parts - secret societies, backstories toggled for maximum effect, angels and demons, suicide squads recruited from among the homeless - the language is more effective for being low key. Yet, even as we’d half-expect any patriotic sentiment of his to be along the lines of, say, Allen Ginsberg’s “America” - “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” - his proclamation seems just right. Not to mention all the bizarreness and violence that pack these pages. Ricky, after all, is an ex-(more or less) heroin addict a onetime cash mule an itinerant janitor who’s cleaned the toilets in several of upstate New York’s less-than-glamorous train stations a now-chaste former serial impregnator of women and one of the few child escapees of the charismatic religious cult led by three (weird) sisters called the Washerwomen.

There’s something both dissonant and grin-tuggingly candid in his plainspoken admission. “My country is my family,” writes Ricky Rice as he concludes his apologia pro vita sua - a.k.a Victor LaValle’s massive, heroically strange new novel, “Big Machine” (Spiegel & Grau: 378 pp., $25).

Big machine by victor lavalle