At the start of Shalom Auslander's staggeringly nervy new novel "Hope: A Tragedy," a doleful Solomon Kugel climbs fearfully into the attic of his recently acquired farmhouse. He hopes the tapping sounds emananting from there are being made by mice.

No such luck. The tapping is coming from a typewriter. And the typist, a stooped, foul-mouthed old lady who does not suffer fools gladly, is the single person about whom Jewish writers most avidly fantasize: Anne Frank.

Other fiction writers have gotten fresh with Anne Frank. But they don't get much funnier. Auslander is neither a voyeur nor a romantic when it comes to conjuring Anne. He is an absurdist with a deep sense of gravitas, bringing to mind Woody Allen, Joseph Heller or a libido-free version of Philip Roth.

As a man who becomes involved with a famously and totally unattainable woman, Kugel aligns nicely with Allen's Kugelmass, the guy who was dropped into the midst of "Madame Bovary" only to find out how overrated Emma Bovary's charms could be. Certainly that's how "Hope: A Tragedy" unfolds at first. When Kugel encounters the old bat claiming to be Anne, he is too dumbfounded to be diplomatic. Indignantly, he calls her an insult to the memory of the young girl who died in Auschwitz. "It was Bergen-Belsen, jackass," Anne Frank replies.

The Kugels are transplants from New York City to the countryside; they have a nosy tenant who demands storage space in the attic where Anne is living; and Kugel's mother lives with the family, pretending to be dying. She is also obsessed with the Holocaust.

When Kugel contemplates calling the police about Anne Frank, he can imagine his mother saying: "What's the matter, you didn't have Dr. Mengele's number? He doesn't make house calls?" When he recalls being taken on a tour of Holocaust sites as a young boy, he remembers his mother's fury when he smiled for a snapshot taken in front of a crematorium. "You ruined the whole concentration camp for me, you know that?" she scolded.

In his first novel, Auslander takes a deadpan, gag-friendly tone that is deceptively flippant. He is clearly serious about the question of where optimism fits into Jewish history and tradition. He treats Anne Frank as the living embodiment of ambivalence: Is she really better off alive when the story of her death has become so cherished? Would anyone want to read the story of her later life, the one she has spent decades trying to write?

Henpecked, hangdog Kugel has an analyst named Professor Jove who shoots down his every upbeat thought. "Give up," says a sign on the doctor's office wall. "You'll live longer." The doctor maintains "Hitler was the most unabashed doe-eyed optimist of the last hundred years."

Kugel tests this philosophy and takes it to heart. One image to which Auslander often returns is that of the Bergen-Belsen photograph in which most of the male prisoners are confined to bunks, while one naked, emaciated man stands half-smiling on the right side of the frame. Is there hope in that smile? What does he hope for? To live or to die?

It's a tall order for Auslander to raise an essentially comic novel to this level of moral contemplation. Yet he succeeds shockingly well. For every stroke of facetiousness — Amazon customers who buy Anne Frank's diary will be told "You might also like" books about Rwanda, the starving of Ukraine and "Pol Pot's Bloody Reign" — there is a laceratingly tough appraisal of the way suffering is made holy.

"Me, I'm the sufferer," Anne finally says. "I'm the dead girl. I'm Miss Holocaust, 1945. The prize is a crown of thorns and eternal victimhood. Jesus was a Jew, Mr. Kugel, but I'm the Jewish Jesus."

Kugel, nebbish that he is, can go toe to toe with her in ways sure to polarize readers. This book never aspires to be pious or politically correct. "Six million he kills," Kugel tells himself, "and this one gets away."