Lydia Millet writes strange, provocative, disturbing novels that illuminate recesses of the human psyche most people would rather not have revealed. At the same time, her work is horrifically funny, profoundly satirical yet committed and compassionate. Such previous novels by Millet as “George Bush: Dark Prince of Love,” “My Happy Life” and “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart,” will remind readers of Melville’s full-dark mode of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Billy Budd”; of Kafka’s short stories like “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist”; and Nathanael West’s bitter, incisive little novels, “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” all works that deal in different ways with isolation, alienation and loneliness, with complicated desires and quenched passions, with the weary workings of humanity worn down to an essential, terrifying nub, the locus where choices are extremely limited and profoundly inevitable.

With “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint, $24), Millet delivers a novel that strips a character of all pretense, custom, habit and certitude, even of personality, to leave an entity that moves blindly forward in a world of blunt instinct. Even as a boy, the novel’s central figure, T., loves money, examining the faces of the Founding Fathers depicted on currency to understand their characters: he admires Andrew Jackson because it seems as if “no passing insult could compel him to emote.” This slightly curious locution mirrors T’s own sense of formality and detachment; he requires neither friends nor praise, only the satisfaction and protection that success and money bring. Though a genius at business, he lives modestly, alone, but in the grip of a vision:

Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.

Yet contingencies arise, cracking T’s world of purpose and discipline. First, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote; getting out of his car, stunned, confused, he sits with her as she dies: “the fullness, the terrible sympathy.” T.’s father unaccountably leaves his mother; she moves in with her son and gradually becomes obsessed, then eccentric, then demented. Improbably, T. acquires a girlfriend — “it was her self-possession that got him” — but there is a flaw in her heart, an unpredictable nick of the sort that doctors only know is there after a person inexplicably dies. Now T. begins to realize: “Authority was not all.”

Even as T. organizes his greatest real estate project, a resort on a jungle island in Belize, he begins sneaking into zoos at night and climbing into cages with different animals. Such a device might require a hefty dose of suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part, but Millet has carefully, stealthily prepared for it; we understand T.’s fierce sense of justice, his obsession with order, his growing feeling of dissolving priorities and judgments. The animals seem otherworldly, doomed. “They liked anything that was more than nothing.”

On a trip to Belize, T. is trapped by a hurricane that destroys much of the town where he is staying. With the roads washed out, he agrees to an overland trek through the jungle with a guide, but the guide dies, and T. is left alone, lost, “unqualified.” This is, of course, the journey into the heart of darkness that enlightens and debases Western man in his encounter with the primal worlds that lie beyond the borders of comprehensible precepts and principles.

The whole world had been the systems of men, Millet writes with simple and poignant eloquence, and he recalled faintly what a comfort it had been to admire it.

And it was not — as he considered now, huddled and wretched and further from cities than he had even been –that these systems and the rules that bound people to them were not close to the core of life: but the life they described was a narrow life, a fast life. It was a small life, the life of certainty and straight paths, that life of crowds and buildings.

And look. Look!

It had passed.