Alcohol saturated 20th-century fiction, gluing novels together: It practically created its own brand of herky-jerky realism. But in recent times those tight characters are less tolerable: They are now alcoholics. Fiction itself has dried out. A.L. Kennedy’s astonishingly good new novel, “Paradise” (Knopf, 288 pages, $25), is all about alcoholism, but is soberly illuminating.

At the level of the sentence, Ms. Kennedy’s first-person narrator thinks and talks like an alcoholic. Hannah was a bright girl; she is now a bright alcoholic. Her metaphors tend to lurch, uncertainly, into nonsense, but her sentences always land on their feet: “He agrees with the kiss and continues it, our noise first amplifying, then mutating until it’s like wet flesh dropping, slapping on a floor.” As that noise “amplifies” into “wet flesh,” the reader may balk at such abstract synesthesia, but by the end of the sentence, the rightness of Kennedy’s image is unmistakable.

It is her epistemological verite that distinguishes Ms. Kennedy’s from most fiction about drink. Hannah is devoted to the present, acutely sensitive to how she is feeling at any given moment, while the past and future are held at bay. She pauses, at an airport, to think about how her body is relaxing: “This would probably not be visible to the untrained eye, but I am slowly and viciously yawning from my ankles up, the warmth of it undulating in my veins.”

About God, Hannah has many thoughts, most of them sympathetic. Like God, she feels she is alone. There is something problematically Christian in her meditations on “the drinker’s smile,” a grin of unapologetic helplessness that drinkers use when they offend. “But the drinkers: who’ll watch over them?” Ms. Kennedy finesses the paradoxes of self-destructive habit with Damocletian confidence.

Dragged to a church service by her brother, Hannah considers her idea of charity, a simple willingness to give pleasure to herself and others, as it differs, she believes, from the church’s. Her sense of being misunderstood, along with her majestic array of narcissisms, follows her into rehab and a sober period that lasts several months.

But, as Hannah tries to decide whether she is happy with sobriety, Ms. Kennedy fully adumbrates the seriousness of the alcoholic’s problem: Drink becomes a cipher for all meaning, and all of meaning’s paradoxes. Hannah has an internal “drinking voice” that has “seen my soul” and knows her better than her family. The drinking voice is identical to her consciousness. And her ability to love derives from drink, from the permeability it brings to her ego.

Hannah is a monster and an angel; she would be intolerable were she not so completely illuminated by Ms. Kennedy. “Paradise” is a humane book, richly readable, and, most important given its subject, honest.

***

Stanley Crawford is an American eccentric whose tedious masterpiece, “Some Instructions,” seems indeed to have become a manual for a younger generation of writers best personified by Ben Marcus. Mr. Crawford’s new book, “Petroleum Man” (Overlook, 238 pages, $23.95), is more entertaining.

Leon Tuggs is a postmodern tycoon in a parallel universe. The inventor of something akin to Post-It notes, he has recently branched out into fast food. He is composing a memoir for his grandchildren, each chapter of which corresponds to a gift to them – a custom-made model replica of, in sequence, every vehicle that Mr. Tuggs has ever owned. The memories associated with each vehicle are laid out, creating a Horatio Alger tale, complemented by Mr. Tuggs eccentric economic theories.

Mr. Crawford has invented a character so in tune with globalization and other quirks of our contemporary economy that his satire almost becomes an apology. “We live in the great crowning age of things, in which each year our national industrial genius picks up some hitherto simple object and makes it far better and more complex.” Mr. Tuggs suggests that the “Petroleum Man” is the apotheosis of racial destiny, a creature designed to consume things as fast as possible.

“Make things your friends,” he advises his grandson. To environmental hecklers, Mr. Tuggs proposes a theory of “Cosmic Recycling,” in which the end of the world obviates the short-sighted concerns of tree huggers. These theories are so radical they seem veritably European. Mr. Tuggs prides himself on having phone calls with the President – but Paul Virilio might be a more suitable interlocutor.

Mr. Crawford’s novel is essentially a meditation on hobbyism and rugged individualism. These two seemingly contradictory impulses synergize in the garages of suburbia; in the tycoon who considers himself the ultimate exponent of his age, they positively explode. The model cars which Mr. Tuggs gives to his children become his greatest weakness: As they mature his grandchildren could not care less about painstaking antique models, and Mr. Tuggs’s contrarian theories implode as the humane emotional needs of a grandfather overwhelm him. “Petroleum Man” is one of the best kinds of satires: the document of a man incessantly belying himself.