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Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis is a farcical novel about the inception of Gnomon Society, a secret order run by men donning cone hats and preaching Hermetical and Pythagorean Harmony. It is, perhaps, the realization of what A Confederacy of Dunces hero Ignatius would call— “good theology and geometry.” Gnomonism is a theology actually based upon geometry, sacred triangles in particular. Portis harnesses the hilarity of absurdist Monty Python-esque characters to deliver a plot that sprawls and teems, like a virulent fungus allowed to mushroom ridiculously unchecked. In a novel that pokes fun at the strange affinity men have for secrecy, Portis makes sure that his reader constantly feels on the outside of the story, unable to guess at the next furtive, unexpected turn.

The cast of characters are all schizotypal sorts— “Odd Birds of Illinois and Indiana” – who Portis winks are the sort of men who “ordered strange merchandise through the mail, went to court often, wrote letters to the editor, wore unusual headgear, kept rooms filled with rocks and old newspapers. In short, independent thinkers.” In short, a religion run by clones of The Office’s Dwight Shrute.

Portis takes the stance of omniscient narrator who without laying on judgment merely reports wild fantastical adventures with a straight face, which adds to the hilarity. “Children stopped to stare openly at his feet, great spreading white organs that were coated with hair like the feet of some arctic bird. He danced about on the hot concrete.” Portis’ dry tone betrays any suggestion that he finds these odd birds, himself one among them, ridiculous. When one of the Gnomons goes out to collect and grow plants suspected to harbor gold in their leaves, Portis lists the various nettles: “nipplewort, chickweed, bagweed, stinkweed, and other coarse vegetation” without a grin. The Institute for Advanced Gnomonic Study is established and charges exorbitant tuition, payable in advance and nonrefundable. The Institute admits students who are made to sleep on cold tile floors, eat alfalfa sprouts and morning glory seeds, and attend sessions in which the lecturer is accompanied by “lute music, or rather, to lute strumming.” The lute strummer Noel Kinlow “could not actually play the lute; he simply trailed his fingers across the strings from time to time, on a signal from Hen, to point up some significant recurring word or phrase.” The humor thickens the more the satire strikes notes close to home. Been to a yoga class lately? Or a Free Mason meeting? Or California? You know the Institute experience. Portis’ cultic fun is a matter of all seriousness, which makes it all the more stone funny.

The characters, too, deliver their ridiculous lines with straight faces. “He called for two pencils and ‘two shits of pepper.’ Popper found pencils and sheets of paper.” Gnomons take one another seriously; silly mispronunciations and unfortunate accents are not giggled over. “My hands are tied, you understand. Our laws are written in blood on the dried guts of a serpent. But look here, Cezar, don’t take it so hard.” Neither partner of the most absurd dialogue ever flinches or chuckles. The idea of laws written in blood on dried snake guts? Perfectly normal. When a talking blue jay is found dead at Mystery Ranch, Popper leans over curled toes and agape beak to whisper “You were a good friend, Squanto.” As he says this, grief-stricken, he drops a kerosene lamp whose flames ignite the ranch. He waits to evacuate until after he has said to the dead bird, “You couldn’t sing and you weren’t much of a flier but I know in your heart you soared.” He stomps ineffectually at the flames and wonders if his evil day will never end, much like Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) in Dumb and Dumber rocked his dead bird Peety and uttered similar silly sincerities.

The characters keep themselves vexingly unknowable. A man introduces himself as an Albanian refugee from Turkey named Nick. After dinner he reveals his real name, Mike, and says he is actually a Greek from Alexandria, Egypt. After several months, Mike confesses that his real name is Jack, and he is an Armenian from Damascus. Finally, deep within Gnomon Society, Jack divulges his true Gnomon identity: he is Robert, a French Gypsy from Malta. Then Robert disappears from the plot entirely. The plot itself telescopes with its characters, further and further out there. What adds to the ridiculousness of everything are constant additions of new information, new characters, characters that reveal new identities or motives for themselves, new places, new rules and amendments to the Codex Pappus, the Book of Gnomon. Gnomon society seems at times to offer a revolving door to opportunists and weirdos worldwide. With the chaos of infinite new variables to factor into the story, Portis, around page 108, seems to lose any authorial control over his story, and the thing itself grows via improbable serendipity, perhaps following the Telluric Current, and Gnomon Society swells and collapses several times over several decades until the book closes, or it seems, Portis grows weary of chronicling the sprawling tale, and he leaves the characters to themselves in their new Temple, a mobile-home park on an East Texas Ranch, where Grand Master Jimmerson throws a rather anticlimactic Christmas party for his ilk.