We are in the company of four young gentlemen on the verge of graduating from high school in a provincial town within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Three are the sons of bourgeois fathers: a doctor, a colonel, and a wealthy grocer. The doctor’s son, Ábel, harbors literary aspirations. Tibor, the son of the colonel, is a pretty boy and an airhead, despite the refinement of his manners. Béla, the grocer’s son, is the runt of the group, and the most instinctually mischievous. The fourth, Ernó, a cobbler’s son, has climbed into their ranks on his scholastic merits and is all too aware of the precariousness of his class ascent. When not cowering in bed, the crippled older brother of the colonel’s son, Lajos, joins the gang. Just a year their senior, he is missing an arm from his stint on the front in World War I, still raging beyond the horizon.

In the face of the numb indifference that has gripped their town, the boys undertake a highly self-conscious, and deliberately meaningless, rebellion. They are reacting to the decay of the culture they have inherited, the gore that awaits them at the front, and their sense that their elders have raised them only to betray them. The boys keep up appearances in the classroom and among their families while they create a secret society with its own rules, drawn from the first principle “everything for its own sake.” They establish a hideout on the outskirts of town, where they drink, play cards, tell one another lies, and stow whatever they steal.

The wider subject of “The Rebels” by Sándor Márai (Knopf, 278 pages, $24.95) is the accelerating collapse of the society against which the boys have aligned themselves. The adults are either away at the front — the colonel, leading the charge into bloodshed; the doctor, performing his daily round of amputations — or they are studies in the grotesque. The cobbler, spitting up blood from a lingering chest wound suffered at the front, delivers rants on the nature of class. The women — mothers and aunts — are barren or bedridden. The most revolting of this freakish cast is the town’s obese pawnbroker, who gorges himself on ham from the bone in his shop, surrounded by chandeliers, candelabra, musical clocks — the relics of a town gone collectively into hawk. “The Rebels” is a morbidly comic novel, an extended joke whose punch line is a corpse in the costume of a clown.

First published in 1930, “The Rebels” is the third of Márai’s novels to appear in America in the past six years, following “Embers” (2001) and “Casanova in Bolzano” (2004). (Knopf reportedly retains the rights to 23 more novels.) Márai’s 1972 “Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948” surfaced in 1996 from Central European University Press in Budapest. Born in 1900 in present-day Kosice ÿ , Slovakia, the author published journalism and poetry in his teens. His first novel, “The Butchers,” appeared in Vienna when he was 24. Much of his 20s were spent abroad, in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris, until he settled in Budapest, where he wrote prolifically until his exile in 1948. “The Rebels,” a relatively early novel, is a young man’s furied re-creation of the onset of disillusionment.

There was more of that to come. Márai comes advertised as “profoundly anti-fascist and anti-communist.” The fascism of Admiral Horthy’s Hungary and the Soviet state that arrived in its wake were deserving objects of his scorn, but Márai’s was a contempt that, born of nostalgia for the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian bourgeoisie, knew few bounds. Indeed, he despised the 20th century itself. In the opening pages of his memoir, Márai describes the dining room he shared with his wife in Budapest: “The intimate, ominous flickering of the candlelight illuminated the faces, the bourgeois interior, the old furniture. I never bought any furniture; everything we owned was inherited from the estates of our two families, from two households in Upper Hungary. We didn’t have any art treasures, but we didn’t have a single piece of store-bought furniture either. The tastes and habits of our ancestors had selected everything arranged in our rooms.”

For Márai, humanity’s potential expired with those ancestors. He spent most of his exile in America, first in New York City, moving to San Diego in the late 1970s. He continued to write but forbade his works to appear in Hungary until Soviet withdrawal. Although he wrote and worked for Radio Free Europe, he never, in the manner of a Nabokov or a Kundera, saw fit to engage with his new home, where at least, he wrote in a 1985 journal, “everything I have disliked is appeasingly remote.” By the end of his life, his pessimism had become absolute. “The middle class,” he wrote in 1988, “which followed the bourgeoisie in the overcrowded, technologically self-contained world, already does not create, it only consumes. … The world is an empty and meaningless place and nothing in it more empty and meaningless than Man himself.” A year later, at age 89, most of his family already gone, he took his own life.

The end of communism in Hungary brought an immediate revival of Márai’s work there. The 1990s saw “Embers” reach the best-seller lists in Italy and Germany. Márai has been linked to his Austrian colleagues Joseph Roth and Robert Musil. Such comparisons ignore the Hungarian’s avowed provincialism. Musil and Roth were cosmopolitans more involved in the innovations of modernism than Márai. His provincial mode is already fully on display in “The Rebels,” more a curiosity than a classic. The novel is marked by passages of bleak elegiac grandeur:

All objects — houses, public squares, whole towns — puff themselves up with spring moonlight, swelling and bloating like corpses in the river. The river dragged such corpses through the town at a run. The corpses swam naked and traveled great distances down from the mountains, down tiny tributaries that flowed into others greater than themselves in the complex system of connections; they floated rapidly down in the spring flood, heading towards their ultimate terminus, the sea. The dead were fast swimmers.

This morbid aesthetic — wherein all paths lead to oblivion — inherently limits the possibilities of the novel. It was Márai’s acheivement that his talent often flourished within the frame of his despair.

Mr. Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s Magazine, last wrote for these pages on the musician Leonard Cohen.