The post-Holocaust novel or memoir has been with us for 60 years now, and like many serious cultural artifacts, it shapeshifts with the times. Dead Man’s Float, by Nicholas Maes, joins this sombre parade and manages to turn an obsessive rumination about European violence and despair into a phantasmagoric excavation of North American pop culture. Quite a feat.

Reading Dead Man’s Float, much of which takes place in a series of symbolic swimming pools, is like immersing oneself in a literary bath made up of many of the most prominent voices of the 20th century. Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Salman Rushdie, Anthony Burgess, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are some of the authors who haunt these pages, with nods here and there to the likes of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Koestler, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ultimately, though, it is two somewhat less-canonical writers whose work this novel most resembles: Steven Millhauser’s strange, Citizen Kane-like Martin Dressler and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. (Though, unfortunately, it’s only the manic and overblown final third of Smith’s otherwise amazing novel I’m referring to.)

The plot here is not complicated. Nathan Gelder, a man in his early seventies, has just suffered a massive stroke. He finds himself floating in a lukewarm pool of memories that go in and out of focus, alternating with bedside scenes of doctors and family members of which the patient is only intermittently aware. Nathan is a Dutch immigrant to Canada, a half-Jew whose parents packed him off at the start of the war to a wealthy uncle in Montreal. They perished – she in the camps and he (the Gentile of the two) by suicide.

The novel’s memory trail takes us through Nathan’s upbringing, education, marriage (also to a Gentile), fatherhood, successful career as a translator, and first heart attack. More crucially, it takes us on the familiar but haunting voyage of Holocaust survival: the utter abandonment Nathan feels when his family is wiped out, the isolation and resentment he embraces as he grows up in Canada, irrational bursts of aggressiveness, ambivalence about Israel, and an inability to embrace good fortune. Love comes very hard, too. Moreover, because of his mixed parentage, he is fixated on details of ethnic coding even as he tries to escape them. This confused man’s children are named Peter (“the church’s founding father”) and Leni (as in what? Riefenstahl?).

As he ages, Nathan’s obsessions become more acute, not less. He is determined to avenge his parents’ death and becomes convinced that his appropriate victim is a mega-star rock/rap singer named Leonard Barvis, whose message to the world is one of monstrous egotism: “There ain’t no wisdom/There ain’t no wealth/There ain’t no freedom/Your soul is mine.” Barvis’s worldwide acolytes dress themselves in his uniform – white jackets and red jodhpurs – and his quasi-religious rock concerts have a strong whiff of Nuremberg about them. Nathan stalks the singer on a five-city tour that ends, fatally for Barvis, on the roof of a hotel in downtown Toronto. Did Nathan do it? That’s really the only mystery in this novel, which becomes horribly belaboured in its last 100 pages.

But before that overheated and ill-advised climax, the reader is taken on a clever and fascinating journey through the second half of the 20th century, Nathan’s life marking its personal milestones in time with history’s beat: “As I was reading an account of Hilary’s conquest of Mt. Everest….” “The night the Berlin Wall took shape….” Eventually he hits the 1980s, when a neverending televised string of 50th anniversaries makes him live his early life over again. In fact, Maes makes a good case that it’s the constant media obsession with these anniversaries that finally drives men like Nathan round the bend. “Fifty years of guff and fury and failure and fantasy and procrastination,” Gelder tells us from his memory-pool, sounding a little like Hamlet and a little like Macbeth.

If there is a serious theme in the midst of all this pop-culture satire, it is Nathan’s concern with distinctiveness – personal, racial, and political. After his parents’ death in Nazi Europe, it is natural perhaps for him to crave assimilation, which is why he goes a bit berserk when his son “converts” to a seriously Orthodox strain of Judaism. On the other hand, Leonard Barvis represents the complete eradication of personality and difference in the face of an all-powerful and domineering global force. “Can we abide without distinctions?” asks Nathan at the end of the book, by which time his inner voice is incessantly repeating the words, “Nathan Barvis Nathan Barvis Nathan Barvis.” A dark ending to a most curious and rewarding novel.