“Samedi the Deafness” (Vintage, 281 pages, $12.95) is not a title that rolls off the tongue, but then little in Jesse Ball’s debut novel is built to be user-friendly. An ostensible mystery, it develops into a stubborn maze that aims to please fans of David Lynch rather than those of Raymond Chandler.

James Sim is a young mnemonist, who can quickly memorize very large amounts of data. Reading the newspaper in a park one day, he’s distracted by the distressed cries of a stabbing victim, Thomas McHale, whose bloody chest looks “like a rent and torn shirt.” Using his last few breaths, McHale coughs out a string of bizarre and foreboding clues about a group of conspirators led by someone named Samedi that must be exposed. Armed with this disturbing information, and having just watched a man die in agony, James does what any of us might — he goes to a diner and tries to forget the whole thing.

But soon his curiosity and conscience spur him to follow the first of McHale’s leads, to locate someone named Estrainger. James doesn’t find him, but during his search he witnesses another mysterious death, soon after which he is abducted and taken to a large country estate. It’s here that Mr. Ball leaves behind any aspirations to conventional suspense and dives headlong into the absurd.

The estate is an asylum for compulsive liars. James suspects the people who run it are tied to Samedi, and want to keep watch over him because of what he knows. The one resident who seems willing to help James is a young woman named Grieve, a chronic liar herself. The pair develop an unusual romance, while James keeps up with distressing news from the outside world — an apparent string of daily suicides on the White House lawn, each found with a note signed by Samedi, warning of a great and deadly catastrophe at the end of the week. Mr. Ball’s most developed talent is a smart sense of playfulness. At one point, Grieve charmingly explains that the asylum’s cat is called by different names depending on the mood it is in — Mephisto when he’s bad, Xerxes when he’s quietly sunning himself, Benvolio when he’s scared or hiding. There are times, though, when this cleverness curdles into whimsy, as in this flashback to when James was 7 years old: “Ansilon was James’s one friend. He was an invisible owl who could tell the future and also speak English, although he preferred to speak in the owl language, which James understood perfectly.”

Mr. Ball has an owl language of his own. The most disappointing aspect of “Samedi,” given that the author is also a poet, is the frequent inelegance of its prose. Even when the images are striking, there are many moments when one would swear this novel had been clumsily translated from another language:

The man was crouched in a way that James recognized. It was the manner of a dog that had been severely wounded by another dog in the presence of people and other dogs who all had done nothing to stop any of it.

These flashes of stilted expression are so consistent throughout that they appear deliberate — and achieve an unnecessary level of odd menace.

Samedi’s ultimate plan is cartoonish enough to be read as either purposeful subversion of expectations or simply anticlimactic. The eventual use for James’s astounding memory is a more satisfying, ifnotearth-shattering, twist. Not much in the novel adds up, but addition is clearly not the sort of math that interests Mr. Ball, whose Web site describes his work as “the study of writing as constructed thought, with an emphasis on devices of ambiguity and paradox.” Rare is the fiction writer who can successfully match such abstract concerns with an absorbing story. For now, at least, Mr. Ball isn’t one of them. It’s fine to send your readers into the rabbit hole, but make sure there’s enough down there to justify the trip.

Mr. Williams is a writer living in Brooklyn.