“And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains. All my knowledge consumes itself.” So notes the eponymous narrator of “Angelica” (Random House, 331 pages, $25.95), the third novel by Arthur Phillips. His first two, “Prague” (2002) and “The Egyptologist” (2004), demonstrated a fascination with trick narratives similar to that of David Mitchell. “The Egyptologist,” a tale of archaeological fabrication, was compared to Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” consisting of a prime document within a frame that casts doubts on its authenticity. And Mr. Phillips’s first book, the best seller “Prague,” imagined American expatriates playing a bluffing game, in which their stories — some true, most false — constitute the meat of the novel.

In “Angelica,” the conceit is more claustrophobic. The book is supposedly a text written at the request of Angelica’s psychoanalyst. Looking back at her late-Victorian childhood from three perspectives — that of her father, her mother, and a meddling spiritualist — Angelica tries to untangle the events surrounding her father’s disappearance.

The first section, told indirectly from the mother’s point of view, is the longest and also the most tedious. Readers unconvinced by Mr. Phillips past successes would be justified in giving up on this hackneyed tale and its warmed-over Victorian diction. Constance, Angelica’s mother, was a counter girl who married up. Her husband, Joseph Barton, a half-Italian medical assistant, appears as a caricature of the Victorian male. He loves Darwin to a fault, practices pedantic tests on animals, boasts of military greatness, looks down on “natives,” condescends to women, and is generally a font of chauvinistic platitudes. “You cannot be expected to understand,” he says when Constance breaks in on his lab work, “but you shall obey and respect.”

The misunderstanding between Constance and Joseph is sexual. After two dangerous miscarriages, Constance finally produced Angelica, after which the medical authorities forbade intercourse. Constance believes her man to be a boiling Italian buck, possessed, possibly, by the devil. She fears for her life. Night after night, and chapter after chapter, crude dreams come to her: “She wished to be gentle with him, deny herself her meal despite the ache of appetite, and so she restrained herself and ate only handfuls of his hair.”

Perhaps Mr. Phillips means to satirize psychoanalysis and employs the instability of characterization, the abrupt plot twists, and the clumsy narrative to reflect Angelica’s hesitations and lapses before her subject. The unbelievable dialogue in this section may be Angelica’s subtle interpretation of her mother’s fascinated ear for the Yoda-like speech of the upper classes. “Angelica wept herself to sleep, so isolated she feels,” says Constance. Chapters later, in a similar exchange, Joseph replies: “The girl will have nightmares. Do not dramatize. She will settle in no time — mark that.”

Readers will have to decide just how suggestive Mr. Phillips’s prose is, but for bone-tingling suspense, it certainly suggests too much. “A thought skimmed across the surface of Constance’s mind,” at one point, after it has already plowed deeply into our own.

The proposed narrative payoff for all this, the Rashomon-like rush of revelation, begins in the second section. Anne Montague, a failed actor turned exorcist who ministers to Constance, has her turn. Angelica imagines the spiritualist to be a second psychoanalyst, one who sees grisly reality behind every superstition. In this case, Constance’s visions sublimate a dreadful fact: that Joseph is molesting Angelica. Mr. Phillips puts “Hamlet” into use here: Anne sees a younger actress playing Gertrude, rather than Ophelia, whom the ex-actress somehow mistakes for Gertrude’s daughter. The implication of usurpation speeds its way recklessly to the surface of Anne’s mind.

In the final section imagined from Joseph’s point of view, Mr. Phillips brings the narrative to the mind of a reasonable person. Joseph is revealed to be less of a devil than had been supposed, and there is some satisfaction in reading the same scenes, told now for the second or third time, with the hot air taken out of them. But like the preceding sections, this one ends with Joseph’s own fate in doubt.

Angelica demonstrates, at the end, that she can’t decide what really happened — whether her mother or Anne killed Joseph, or whether he killed himself, or just left — but she does decide that he was treated unfairly. The whole novel, then, adds up to a critique of hysteria in all its forms, on and off the couch, and ends on a convenient note of uncertainty. But the initial questions about Joseph’s sins and his fate — the questions that get the book rolling — don’t seem to have been met with narrative candor. And the fundamental limits of Angelica’s reliability, as she tries to speak sincerely in three disagreeing voices, are too blurry to suit anyone but the impish Mr. Phillips.

blytal@nysun.com