"Idiopathy," by Sam Byers - NYTimes.com A donkey is tethered between two identical pails, each filled with the same amount and type of oats. If free will exists, the donkey will eat from one before the other. But if free will doesn't exist, the donkey - lacking any justification for its preference - will just sag in place until it starves to death. "Buridan's Ass" became an Enlightenment joke at the expense of medieval determinism, specifically that of the French cleric Jean Buridan, whose critics reduced his philosophy to a caricature: between equivalent options, there can be no choice. "Idiopathy," the first novel by Sam Byers, essentially duplicates this mock experiment to arrive at the same insane result, under modern lab conditions: the setting is now Norwich, England, and the new asses are agribusiness cows: "It was a bad time for beef, even then. Up and down the country, cattle were trancing out. Farmers were finding lone members of the herd at the edges of fields staring blank and unblinking into the middle distance, starving and dehydrating to death. They're suffering from a strain of the title's malady, "a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown." For a novelist with such control over his characters, this claim is gleefully disingenuous. As B.I.E., or Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement, spreads to sheep to become Ovine Idiopathic Entrancement, the book's bipedal characters worry that they'll be infected too, though the idiotic futility of their chatter suggests they're terminal already. Katherine is the facilities manager at a local telecom company; "having moved from London to Norwich by mistake," she drinks a lot, smokes a lot and has a prodigious amount of sex in a manner that's casual in everything but its violence. Her ex-boyfriend, Daniel, is a whiny, ineffectual P.R. flack for the Jenssen-Meyer Center, which conducts biochemical crop research. His present girlfriend, Angelica, is a hippie who can't pass the muesli without saying "Love you," and can't pass the milk without worrying about its provenance. Keith is a recovering heroin addict who impregnates Katherine on vacation in Malta, then hits her up to cover half the trip's expenses once he's been dumped. Let's not forget Sebastian, an eco-activist who protests outside Jenssen-Meyer and blames its corn for the plague ("Have we learnt nothing from Auschwitz?"); and Nathan, a friend whom Katherine and Daniel had lost track of after he tried to carve the tattoos off his body with a camping knife in the middle of a rave. "Idiopathy" wanders into its bleakest pastures after Nathan is discharged from the Sanctuary, a private psychiatric facility, and remanded to the care of "Mother Courage," his mother's new identity as a self-help guru to fellow parents who've "survived" the raising of troubled children. But while her billing might be Brechtian, her theatrics are 100 percent prime-time E!: all she expects is that her son open a Facebook account, and link to her Twitter feed, to help virally market her book, whose subject is how he has ruined her existence. Nathan's father, meanwhile, molders at a grubby pub, the Rover, downing Mad Cows, a bespoke cocktail of "Bulmers cider and Red Bull with a dash of crème de menthe." Even as the Katherine-Daniel-­Nathan reunion threatens to become an emotional abattoir, Byers's prose remains spreadsheet-specific, mock analytical, funny. The trend toward jargon and a 50 percent chance of an a.c.r.o.n.y.m. joke in every chapter gives rise to a welcome British version of E.S.L. - Ennui as a Second Language, or Emulating Sam Lipsyte, a style that entertains through mortification, and mortifies through . . . you get it. With Britain mired in a carnivorous scandal last winter (horse DNA was found in "beefburgers" processed by the meat multinationals Findus and Comigel), "Idiopathy" benefits as much from timeliness as from the slow, cud-chewing digressions native only to the novel, and, perhaps, to the four substomachs of cattle. But as the relationships break down in the digestion, Katherine and Daniel's future prospects mix into an indistinguishable bile - "dwindling sex life; roiling resentment" - and the history of their coupling, which they've been doomed to repeat with Keith and Angelica, vacillates between what even junior Marxists might regard as tragedy and farce. Still, the book clubs that chatter forever about fiction seeming "real," or about characters appearing to live "actual" lives, can stick this in their organic dip and choke: novelists are the ultimate determinists, and yet their ability to induce joy most reliably depends on their successful concealment of that fact, or on the art with which they sustain the pretense of agency among their characters. Byers, then, has taken a laudable risk in turning his Bovarys bovine and Kareninas sheepish - in culling the teeming herd of experience for all but the depressing bits, the flailing genitals, hooves and mouthpieces. The problem of how to treat this novel, with its traumas so rigged and rictus so fixed, finally approximates another British dilemma: "Hobson's choice," named after Thomas Hobson, a carrier and stable owner who came of age during the reign of Elizabeth I. Whenever Hobson wasn't using his horses to deliver goods, he rented them out, and in order to ensure their fair rotation adopted the policy that each customer had to accept the next horse available, or none at all. "Take it or leave it" - the only catch phrase for dark literature, and dark life. Joshua Cohen is the author, most recently, of "Four New Messages."