William, or “Mr. Able” as his students and colleagues know him, is having a crisis of faith. An English teacher in the far western flatness of Kansas, he too is being flattened — worn down by his fourth year of teaching at the high school from which he graduated, a job he fell into through haphazard idealism and his father’s school board connections. “It’s not the kids . . . and not their parents,” he explains in the opening pages of Why Teach?, Peter Shull’s earnest new novel.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” said Keats, “—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” But the poet was missing an element. The last two centuries have seen the binary coupling evolve into a ménage à trois. A hot newcomer, Transgression, has joined the hallowed pair as the transcendent purpose and valorizing principle of art, bringing with it a perverse polycule of aesthetic virtues — shock value, envelope-pushing, norm-busting, taboo-shattering, bourgeois-épatering — without which the modern literary canon, and certainly its cover copy and promotional spin, would be seriously bereft.

Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover marks the boisterous, exuberant return of the male gaze to those literary precincts from which it has been excluded for some time now. Lou Kennedy, a 25-year-old half-Cuban, half-Irish, all-Jersey Hobokenite, is a trad cad and debauchee of epic proportions undergoing a crisis of faith. Despite the prodigious amount of booze and innumerable lines of coke he consumes in the week we spend with him, which he, with an engaging combination of guilt and glee, informs us, has been his M.O. since college, a sense of emptiness is fast encroaching.