“You’ll have to live like the rest of us … just less so.” This is the ambiguous diagnosis of Steve’s condition in “The Subject Steve,” a dark comedy addressing issues of death, morality and our society’s obsession with the “self-help” fad.

Steve, which is not his real name — you never get to know what it is — is diagnosed by his two quack doctors, whom he calls the Philosopher and the Mechanic, with a disease they coin “Goldfarb-Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome,” or PREXIS for short.

Steve is the only known person to suffer from this strange disease, which has no apparent cause. He doesn’t know how long he has to live because the doctor duo calculates that no calculations can be made.

After finding that he has a terminal disease, Steve doesn’t embark on, but is rather dragged into, a journey to find a cure for his unknown illness.

He makes his way to a new-age retreat that tries to help the members of its commune to attain “continuum awareness.”

All of the people in the retreat are quirky and speak a quizzical lingo: One dresses as if he’s a soldier in the Revolutionary War, and the leader of the camp tells a story about bestiality when Steve arrives.

Eventually Steve discovers that the way the leader, Heinrich, helps the individuals at the retreat is by “mothering by fire,” essentially torture.

Steve gets tortured by Heinrich and escapes immediately afterward, wandering into a small town. He spends some time healing in their hospital and finally finds his way back to the city.

He is captured by the members of the retreat, and finds himself in the California desert at their new compound, at which the larger and increasingly weird gang produces a morbid cable TV show titled “The Realms.” Steve becomes the subject of one of these shows, “The Subject Steve,” and his grapple with his terminal disease is broadcast over the Internet as a reality show in which the audience votes on Steve’s treatment.

My initial reaction to the book was multifaceted: I was simultaneously puzzled, disgusted and entertained.

“The Subject Steve” has a place on the bookshelf between “Naked Lunch” and “The Crying of Lot 49,” though Sam Lipsyte lacks William S. Burroughs’ fresh-yet-wry descriptions and Thomas Pynchon’s ability to craft intricate allusions.

Lipsyte tackles a host of different themes, such as morality, “memento mori,” pop culture, the purpose of life and reality television and the media.

The theme of memento mori was omnipresent in the novel, and it seemed as if everyone was dying of something except Steve.

I was never able to ascertain the motivation behind Steve’s journey; he seemed unwilling to participate in many of the things he did, yet was too flaccid to stop anything from happening.

The humor in the novel was poignantly dark and satirical, and even though Lipsyte has the tendency to overwrite at times, his style has a unique and feral sharpness about it.

“The Subject Steve” contains many morbid and lewd sexual scenes, which definitely adds to the dark and sardonic mood, but I would advise reader discretion.

Lipsyte surely is playing to a niche audience with “The Subject Steve,” but the novel has earned my recommendation to those looking for an obscenely enlightening experience.