Curtis White would like you to think that he’s too clever for his own good. Scarily enough, he’s probably right.

In one of the centerpiece scenes of his new novel Requiem, White has a character all but answer directly for his author’s excesses. Chris, who bills himself as "the Modern Prophet," defends his almost completely unread books from the charge of being "violent and sexual and mentally disturbed without being — as with, say, Hollywood movies that use the same themes — at all interesting." Chris’ defense, to interviewer Terry Gross, amounts to little more than a shrug, followed by an attack on his inquisitor. (The attack involves the disturbing image of Gross mounting her own secret pornographic website.)

It’s easy enough to see White giving the same response. Requiem can be a complex and difficult read; but more importantly, it’s unflinching and unforgiving, a soup of vignettes and fragmented narratives that its author refuses to tie together neatly. Thick, thorny and antagonistic, Requiem concedes its insights grudgingly. And even though its back-cover blurb attempts to impose a structure on the novel’s wayward interests —the rise and fall of the (idea of the) Human — in its parts and as a whole Requiem sounds out a darker theme. White’s idea of the Human consists almost completely of disintegration, decay and madness.

The mass for the dead, as the title stipulates, provides the book’s external framework. Each "movement" is made up of disconnected fragments of narrative that borrow from an ample range of forms: monologues and interviews, an extensive e-mail exchange, parables, cryptic letters to the editor and scenes from the lives of the classical composers in addition to traditional narration. Some story lines progress; others emerge in single snapshots. The sheer variety of these fragments demands much from White as a stylist, and he manages to acquit himself well in almost all registers. In the space of a few pages, he moves from a near-still-life contemplation of a man drowning, watched by his dogs; to the raving loneliness of an unnamed academic’s correspondence with "Honeycomb," the proprietress of teenslut.com; to a meditation on the life of Saint-Saëns.

Much of the time, White forces a confrontational marriage between mordant humor and disgust. Speaking with the voice of Moses, he advocates — and then graphically demonstrates — the torture and sacrifice of the U.S. Congress for the sins of the nation. In still more uncomfortably explicit detail, he presents the experience of the Irish setter Murph, or rather of Murph’s owners, who use him as an increasingly reluctant prop for a bestiality website. Unsurprisingly, the more White pushes, the less he succeeds. The most "shocking" sections of Requiem, like the NEA-unfit art they emulate, lose their purpose in an adolescent desire to rile.

Through a good deal of Requiem, White’s scabrous obsessions read like moral honesty. The detailed description of a dog’s blowjob comes across as a plausible stab at uncompromising integrity. And this impression works because of the counterbalance provided by the portraits of classical composers which intermingle with the novel’s other strains; the contrast between the tawdriness and impersonality of the digital world and the very human struggles of the classical composers provides a kind of moral economy, a bass line to ground contemporary excess.

But by the end of the novel Haydn has given way to Schumann, and White’s version of the latter’s paranoid, syphilitic ravings becomes as arbitrary and disconnected as earlier riffs on Biblical plague or webcam masturbation. And the honesty of the opening gets exposed as little more than a stunning virtuosity. White is, almost certainly, cleverer than we are. But Requiem does its best to make that seem a thoroughly mixed blessing.

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