When Hari Kunzru’s fourth novel, Gods Without Men, was published in 2011, it represented both a high point and an endpoint in the author’s career. The book is a kaleidoscopic work that teems with life, bursts with inventiveness, and brims with chaotic energy. The multistoried narrative plays out in and around the Mojave Desert in different time zones and alternate realities. The multifarious cast includes a couple searching for their lost son, a Cockney rock star, a Franciscan missionary, a Mormon miner, a war-damaged ethnographer, a shape-shifting charlatan called Coyote, a group of Arab Americans role-playing Iraqi insurgents, and members of a mystical, trippy-hippy UFO cult named the Ashtar Galactic Command. Kunzru impressed readers, but he also painted himself into a corner. This elaborate Russian doll of a novel could only be a one-off: Another one in the same mold would amount to cheap pastiche, diluted originality.