It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But in “Big Machine,” Victor LaValle introduces a group of African-Americans who, having been the victims of abuse or themselves the perpetrators of crimes, are presented with a second chance in life through the ministry of a secretive organization called the “Unlikely Scholars.”

LaValle’s protagonist, Ricky Rice, is an ex-heroin addict who is tapped (as is the case with all secret societies, including Yale’s Skull and Bones, when selecting new members) while at work cleaning the lavatories for Trailways at Union Station in Utica. Ricky is then transported by bus, naturally, into the snowy Vermont woods to join a community of black scholars settled around a neoclassical library. All the scholars are attempting to leave behind a troubled past and all have been deemed worthy of recuperation by a dean who administers the estate and the legacy of an escaped slave named Judah Washburn.

If the Vermont woods seem an unlikely locale for a commune of black ex-cons sifting through troves of historical materials and journals, we’re reminded that Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777 before the American Constitution was written. Their patron, Judah Washburn, had escaped bondage in Georgia in 1775 and fled west to the Spanish territories. He hears a voice (think Jehovah’s Witnesses) that leads him to an underground chamber where he finds two trunks of Spanish gold coins — the basis for his subsequent endowment of the library.

The Unlikely Scholars, then, are the beneficiaries of Washburn’s emancipation and his spiritual enlightenment. But they are tasked with a mission by the dean to search through reams of newsprint for the unusual, the extraordinary evidence of subsequent callings by the Voice. Investigating the supernatural communiques leads the modest band of paranormal detectives into confrontation with a renegade scholar and cult leader, Solomon Clay.

LaValle’s novel is likewise the beneficiary of important 20th century African-American writing. In one corner is the writer of black detective fiction, Chester Himes, whose novels, such as “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” combine the familiar elements of the murder mystery with protests of America’s racist history. Perhaps a sort of model for the character of Ricky Rice in LaValle’s “Big Machine,” Himes served eight years in prison at hard labor for armed robbery, and it was in prison that he first began to write fiction. As an Unlikely Scholar, Ricky doesn’t live up to the demands of the hard-boiled detective, but he finally proves to be more sensitive to his calling than many others.

In the other corner we find that great black postmodern novelist and literary pugilist Ishmael Reed—raised in Buffalo and educated at the University at Buffalo. Reed’s best-known work, “Mumbo Jumbo,” sets the polytheistic, Afro-Caribbean practices of “hoodoo” in opposition to white American Protestant monotheism. LaValle’s Ricky Rice and his sister are raised in a family dedicated to the cult of the Washerwomen who have rewritten the flight of the Chosen People out of bondage and into the Promised Land as an Afro-centric, fugitive slave tale.

The demands of sustaining the conventions of detective fiction, historical revisionism and religious conspiracy prove to be too stressful for LaValle’s narrative and the prospects for Ricky’s spiritual redemption. Ricky’s sojourn to Oakland, Calif., his relationship with fellow scholar, the Gray Lady, and his confrontation with Solomon Clay may not entirely cohere or come to a satisfactory conclusion for the reader. But LaValle’s “Big Machine” is one of those rare books that are persistently entertaining and politically provocative.

Joseph Conte is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

Big Machine

By Victor LaValle

Spiegel & Grau

370 pages, $25