Yasmina Reza, the French playwright responsible for the phenomenally successful “Art” (1999), has called her plays “funny tragedy,” but she seems uneasy with this mixing of genres. On the opening night of “Art” in London, she brushed off a technician who congratulated her on the audience’s warm response. “People are laughing,” she complained, “You can’t hear the words.”

Since “Art,” Ms. Reza has produced three novels — a form that draws more attention to her words. The books, “Hammerklavier” (1999), “Desolation” (2002), and now, “Adam Haberberg” (Knopf, 146 pages, $19.95), share much in common with the plays: Characters rail against one another and the world; happiness is elusive, discontent is rampant, and seemingly inconsequential actions trigger emotional explosions. Despite these grim components, Ms. Reza’s dramatic works have succeeded because the philosophy she offers is both palatable and succinct. You can take a brief dip in her troubled waters, emerge refreshed by the quick wit, and still have time for a late-night dinner.

But even a slim novel like “Adam Haberberg” takes longer than a night at the theater. While Ms. Reza’s antics are entertaining when they bounce between characters onstage, on the page, where we spend more time inside a single character’s head, they are less lively. Adam Haberberg, the protagonist of the novel, is a 47-year-old Parisian writer and one of Ms. Reza’s darker creations. The story begins in the Jardin de Plantes, where Adam sits, contemplating the ostriches, “flabby gray creatures [eating] a kind of straw in front of their hut in a totally bare enclosure,” in weather that is “enough to make you blow your brains out.”

A former schoolmate, Marie Thérèse Lyoc, disrupts Adam’s gloomy meditations and whisks him to her home on the outskirts of Paris. They talk about the past, look at some photos, eat a meal, read an old letter from a mutual friend, and then Adam returns to the city. Adam’s wife phones him sporadically, reminding him of his everyday obligations and normal life, but the surprise reunion and the dynamic between Adam and Marie is what propels the novel. Marie, who sells tchotchkes to gift stores (“mini fridge magnets, traditional fridge magnets, magnetic words, a pocket flashlight”), is a foil to the artist Adam. She takes pride in her role in conspicuous consumption, while Adam doubts whether his contribution to society has any merit or purpose.

But similarities between Adam and Marie emerge as they spend the evening together. He too participates in the disposable economy, producing, according to his own assessment, “one more pile of shit amid the proliferation of useless piles of shit” that masquerade as literature. The only one of his books that he “has any affection for” is an installment in a popular fiction series featuring an intergalactic traveler, a book that he wrote in two and a half weeks and published under a pseudonym. It is a book that “can be found only at train stations and some newsstands” and, like Marie’s knickknacks, will probably be thrown away.

The convergence between the characters raises the question that generated “Art”: What is art? Is a work of art, like the barren canvas in “Art” that precipitates the entire script, one that erases the mark of the artist? Adam’s anonymous pulp novel is the only one “devoid of vanity.” It is the “anti-Adam Haberberg,” and yet it is the work he feels is the best.

After “Art” reached a certain level of success, Ms. Reza told a reporter from Time magazine that she worried that she would be seen as a “singer with only one song.” The shift to novel writing has forced her to change her tune slightly, but “Adam Haberberg” clearly returns to a familiar theme, and not one that Ms. Reza can call her own. The idea of the substance behind an absence goes back at least to the 18th century when Laurence Sterne inserted a black page into “Tristram Shandy” after Parson Yorick’s death. It became a cliché in the early 20th century after artists such as Kazimir Malevich re-issued it for their cause: to eliminate the narrative aspects of art in favor of pure painting, which was the real subject. For Malevich and his followers, the white canvas and the black square would become the new icons of art.

Ms. Reza’s variation on this theme complicates the matter by asking the question: Who is an artist? But the complication primarily takes the form of contradiction, and for no apparent reason, except perhaps to emphasize the instability of Adam’s identity, which is not something that needs underlining. Adam’s primary identifying trait, his name, is both a remnant of the past (when confronted with an old photograph he sees the “man they used to call Adam Haberberg”) and a solid element of the present and future, “the only thing that could be counted on.” And, of course, his name is the title of Ms. Reza’s novel, prompting the further question: Can a work of art and an artist be the same? The philosophy begins to get absurdly reflexive, but unlike Ms. Reza’s plays, it’s just not funny.

Ms. Schama is the assistant literary editor of the New Republic.