These begin with Jeff at age six, his “Year Zero,” a pleasing complement to the final “Zero Year.” Thereafter each stage of the picaresque finds the narrator a bit older and in a different space: “in Captivity” at age 11, or “in Exile” at 15. The reader’s pleasure matters to Jackson, he’s claimed in an interview, and in the novel he takes care to parcel out the hard knocks in a way we can bear, in six swift chapters.

Yet remarkably, in the reading, the book often feels like fun. In Mira Corpora the concluding incidents deliver no epiphany, but instead take its homeless orphan, now 18, back to what the chapter title terms “Zero.” As a final gesture, Jeff scribbles in a half-destroyed notebook, but his imaginings present another horror, a murder story that may itself go to pieces: “stab straight through the page.” Translated from Spanish, the title Mira Corpora suggests both “see these texts” and “see these bodies” it links the blank page, which some would consider a place of possibility, with the stripped corpse. This rough treatment is in keeping with the rest of the novel, a rat’s-eye-view of childhood, and with the growth experience overall: initiation by eradication. His hero “Jeff” (more on the name later) is a sex slave at this point: a 15-year-old with “barely corrupted flesh.” The episode turns on Jeff’s attempt to escape his abuse, but the tension of the moment depends on his damaged faculties he operates on a “Reptile-brain.” A demanding sleight of hand, limited first-person risks obscurity, but Jackson pulls it off by making clear, from early in the chapter, that the central consciousness has been beaten up and heavily medicated. One gripping chapter goes so far as to erase the protagonist’s mind-even though he’s the narrator. Throughout, no motif recurs so often as erasure. It’s a nightmare gallop out of childhood that never arrives at the dawn of maturity. Episodic yet suspenseful, smeared with gutter detritus yet glittering with right-on apercus, the novel delivers both jolts to the spine and food for thought. History be damned, however: In Mira Corpora the switch of genre proves no obstacle.

The Times listed their Botanica among the “ galvanizing theater moments” of 2012, and Jackson and company have shared an Obie. He’s with the Collapsible Giraffe company, a group that combines imaginative experiment and philosophic inwardness. So just picking up Mira Corpora, the debut novel by the New York dramatist Jeff Jackson, you fret for this still-young talent. Going the other way, David Mamet has published two novels that generated nowhere near the excitement of his plays. The signature case would be Henry James, all but bankrupted by his work in theater. The playwright and the novelist may try to share the same skin, but historically, they haven’t made a good fit.

Mira corpora