“We have gotten them to admit that these are the people we accuse them of incarcerating.” Such are the victories open to the enemies of a convoluted bureaucracy.

Nathan Englander’s first novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases” (Knopf, 339 pages, $25), set during Argentina’s Dirty War, is more than a straight dramatization of the notorious “disappearances” perpetrated by Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta between 1976 and 1983. Mr. Englander brings to those events the same folkloric verve that made his story collection, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” (1999), a success. In those stories, Mr. Englander drew on his Orthodox Jewish background. A blend of comedy and tragedy, the heroic stubbornness of his characters recalled the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

And now Mr. Englander broadcasts that humor to Argentina, where it characterizes not just the Jewish community, but everyone in the novel. Even a defenestrated Navy Colonel makes a wisecrack midair: “I should have served in the air force,” he thought. “Then I would have wings.”

The point is not that the wisecrack should be funny, but that everyone victimized by the regime maintains the same ironical sense of humor. They meet the absurdity of the state with absurdity of their own.

Mr. Englander’s hero, the heavy-handedly-named Kaddish Poznan, defaces graves for a living. The son of a prostitute, Kaddish haunts the part of the Jewish graveyard dedicated to the demimonde. Though he makes himself a mascot for these now-deceased pariahs, Kaddish erases their names from their headstones for a fee when their descendents want to delete an inconvenient ancestor. In Argentina, such discretion is more than vanity: It may mean survival under Juan Perón’s second regime or the junta that follows. Kaddish does not presume to judge his clients.

Mr. Englander has fun imagining these lowlifes. He gives us “Hezzi Two-Blades,” “Coconut Burstein,” “Hayim-Moshe ‘one-eye’ Weiss,” “Talmud Harry,” and “the large, very large, very legendary Shlomo the Pin.” Buenos Aires indeed feels legendary, anachronistic, and vague in Mr. Englander’s hands. Only when Kaddish’s mildly Marxist son, the scholarly Pato, disappears, does the novel snap to attention.

Kaddish’s wife, Lillian, sees the trouble coming, and purchases a quadruple-bolted steel door for their apartment to keep young Pato contained. Through her motherly sense of danger, Mr. Englander shows how a helpless citizenry, without the help of any reliable press, can apprehend danger without quite believing it.

When Pato disappears, Kaddish and Lillian embark on a separate quest to find him. The police deny everything, so Kaddish resorts to the underworld, which consists mainly of a plastic surgeon, Mazursky, who previously returned a favor for Kaddish’s effacement services by paring down Kaddish’s and Lillian’s Jewish noses. Lillian, meanwhile, takes her case to the Ministry of Special Cases, where she meets with a predictable runaround.

As the parents grow desperate in their search, their marriage falls apart. But there is little that accumulates, in terms of narrative, through adventures that are both Kafkaesque and picaresque. Kaddish’s best moments come when he talks back to authority. After finagling an audience with a general, who explains away the disappearances as a spate of hippie runaways, Kaddish responds with frankness and careless wit:

“I can only pity you,” the general said. “It’s hopelessness that makes you talk this way.”
“I’m not hopeless,” Kaddish said. “Everybody better pray that it doesn’t get to that.” The general, amused, leaned back in his chair. “You go on my list,” Kaddish said. “The government has its list. You go on mine.”

Lillian, on the other hand, only exacerbates her helplessness with her faith in willpower that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been desperate in the face of officialdom. She counts on the smile of a receptionist; she puts a photograph of Pato on a policeman’s desk, just so.

Lillian and Kaddish ultimately resort to the Jewish community that ostracized them. “I want my big nose back, Kaddish,” says Lillian. Symbols such as that nose come to be more important to Mr. Englander than representations of life. Even Kaddish’s bickering, with its blind spots, mirrors the evasions of the bureaucracy. Beyond all these symmetries Mr. Englander’s intelligence works overtime, with a thoroughness that only flourishes in its more abbreviated forms.