Samuel Beckett is often called a terminus in Anglo-Irish literature. He took modernism’s radical approach as far as it would go; it is as though Jackson Pollock was succeeded by portraitists and landscape artists.

B.S. Johnson (1933-73) did not get the memo. In 1961, while shopping his first book to agents, Johnson compared it favorably to “Ulysses,” and declared himself in the tradition of “Petronius, Apuleius, Rabelais, Cervantes, Nashe, Sterne, and Samuel Beckett.” Tom Stoppard, an early acquaintance, pooh-poohed any resemblance to Sterne: “except that Sterne does certain things as marvellous, irrelevant and irreverent jokes … which Johnson does in grim meaningful earnestness.”

Indeed, Johnson came overdressed to the party of postwar British literature, standing in the corner, drops of sweat on his forehead. No one talks to him. “I shall be much more famous when I’m dead,” he once said. Sadly, he was wrong. It makes sense that his greatest champion, in recent years, has been his biographer, the social-realist novelist Jonathan Coe, a writer less interested in curating pantheons than in a good screwball character.

Until now, the only two B.S. Johnson novels in print in America have done little to put that character across. “Albert Angelo” (1964) and “Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry” (1973) each betray the literal-minded earnestness cited by Mr. Stoppard, taking formal experiment to a concrete extreme. “Albert Angelo” requires the reader to cut away sections of its pages, and “Christie Malry” comes complete with double-entry accounting ledgers that tally the hero’s daily “aggravation” against his vigilante “recompense.” But they are not joyless — indeed “Christie Malry” is often ludicrous. Yet neither of these books expresses the man whom Mr. Coe sees, and himself describes, in the biography “Like a Fiery Elephant.”

But with “The Unfortunates” (New Directions, 176 pages, $24.95), Johnson’s novelistic memoir of a friend’s death from cancer, which he published in 1969, the author suddenly comes alive. Never before released in America, “The Unfortunates” is a work of great pathos, and it offers a fresh and humane perspective on the world of “red brick” universities lampooned by Kingsley Amis in “Lucky Jim.”

Johnson’s friend Tony Tillinghast was an undergraduate at Nottingham University when the two met, as collaborators on an intra-collegiate magazine, Universities’ Poetry. They took their lofty bull sessions as seriously as they took their quixotic magazine, and became close friends. Tony stayed on as a graduate student at Nottingham, specializing in Boswell, while Johnson started work on his first novel, “Travelling People” (the one that compared favorably to “Ulysses”). Tony became a sounding board for Johnson, and the two visited frequently, when Tony came up to the British Museum for research, or when Johnson took one of his many girlfriends to Nottingham for a weekend. But shortly after Tony had finished his dissertation — and was finally ready to begin his career — he was diagnosed with cancer, which proved fatal.

Years later, working as a sportswriter to earn cash, Johnson found himself in Nottingham again, having traveled almost on autopilot to his next assignment, a soccer match. “But I know this city!” he exclaims, finally brought to his senses by the station’s green ticket hall. His stream of consciousness — insecure and self-correcting, and a shade too writerly — immediately wends toward Tony: “Tony. His cheeks sallowed and collapsed round the insinuated bones, the gums shrivelled, was it, or shrunken, his teeth now standing free of each other … ” After this first epiphany, Johnson suffers a flood of random memories, re-creating for the reader his day in Nottingham.

There is one catch, though: “The Unfortunates” is a book in a box. It consists of 27 loose sections. One is marked “First,” and one is marked “Last,” but the rest are to be read in any random order. In his introduction, Mr. Coe reports that in its day, “The Unfortunates” “was accorded at best a sort of grudging respect, tempered with a palpable, barely disguised disdain for its pretensions to originality.” And we should disdain those pretensions. Johnson insisted that his randomly sorted sections were better at “conveying the mind’s randomness” than any other technique. But this novelty provides little in the way of mimesis, it only draws attention to itself.

And yet it proves to be a great deal of fun. I chose a thicker, stapled section, and then a thinner, pasted one. I would read three tiny sections in a spate. When I saw that the section on top described Tony’s funeral, I decided to avoid it, until finally I couldn’t resist it. On the whole, the freedom to dispose of one tiny packet after another made the book itself an effortless read.

For its honest depiction of how young men deal with cancer, “The Unfortunates” can be widely recommended, even to readers not used to “Nashe, Sterne, and Samuel Beckett.” Johnson’s own dogged seriousness, and his concomitant boyishness, make a fascinating medium for his occasional bursts of pity and shy friendliness. This book deserves a place in the history of memoir, and in anthologies about illness, and, with luck, it will have one, if readers do not judge it by its covers.

blytal@nysun.com