Think ‘The Public Enemy’ in magic realism lite

And yet they breathe, they feel, they move — quickly. There’s no time to plumb the spiritual dimensions of their reincarnation. From the moment their naked feet hit the floor of the police morgue, they are chasing and chased, trying to figure out why they’re alive and hoping to avoid being killed again. Their criminal associates, the police, and even ordinary citizens hoping for reward money vie to bring a sudden end to their miraculous resurrection.

Their goals in this new chance at life? To pull a series of bank jobs so they can reunite with the women who love them and retire in style to something legitimate and reasonably glamorous, like running a restaurant in California.

In other words, death has changed nothing.

Tampering with the rules of mortality like this allows Mullen to build new layers of suspense into the kinds of gangster adventures that have filled books and movies since Prohibition. When the Firefly Brothers, as the Firesons are known, make their daringly unmasked double bank robberies, tommy guns blazing, no one, including them, has any idea whether they’ll live or die. Or whether either condition will stick.

Surprisingly, perhaps, given that they start off deceased, you come to care deeply about these characters and their fate. Mullen is a spirited writer, delivering consistently smart dialogue and observations. “This is the kind of thing that shakes a man’s unfaith,” Whit remarks on returning to life. A character, unemployed and destitute, stands with “Time overflowing, spilling out of his empty pockets,” having lost the trick of turning it into money. “All down the street were other failed magicians, dressed in rags.”

Much of the book concerns the Firesons’ family story. Jason, the oldest brother, earns his father’s contempt by shirking duties at the grocery store, but wins fame in the wider world for his panache. Whit, devastated by the family’s poverty, turns to radical socialism. Their father, middle brother, and long-suffering mom play it straight — a strategy that, in the Depression, causes the greatest heartbreak of all.

In fact, though his novel relies centrally on a magical device, Mullen’s eye for social realism and resonant bits of history are his greatest strengths. Witness this description of life in a camp of the unemployed, where among fruit-crate shanties and listless children, “the heads of family members pok[ed] out of rusted auto bodies like prairie dogs.” A fascinating subplot involves agent Cary Delaney of the new “Bureau of Investigation.’’ Hungry and brainy, men like him are key to J. Edgar Hoover’s efforts to “dictate reality” through shows of science and superior firepower. But, Delaney wonders, is he complicit in “puffing up the exploits of a few country thieves, all the better to frighten a cowering nation into handing a big stick and a blank check to its self-appointed protectors?”

Then there are the women of the novel. In their relatively fewer pages, they form its emotional core. Veronica, Whit’s wife and mother to his infant son, is a hard-bitten survivor of the worst the Depression can do to a working-class family. Darcy, Jason’s “twist,” is an heiress who falls in love with him for the debonair way he takes her hostage. Her belief in him is touching and nearly enough, in itself, to prevent his succumbing to mere mortality.

It is on this last subject, belief, that the novel ultimately has the most to say. Mullen takes great pains to establish that the Firesons are not merely the people we see on the page, but figures of popular imagination, the Firefly Brothers who rob from the rich and give to the poor. They slip through impossible traps and, like other celebrity criminals, defy ordinary limits. (Mullen cites the curious historical fact — no doubt an inspiration for his fiction — of Dillinger appearing in dozens of states after the FBI publicly gunned him down).

Not the real gangsters, but the immortal story figures, Mullen indicates — in lines that sometimes strain awkwardly for significance — come from our own need to believe in something larger than life. At one point Darcy puzzles over this very term, which she’s heard applied to Jason: “What can be larger than life? Death, or is that smaller?” Definitely smaller, Mullen’s novel suggests. In times as bleak as the Great Depression, with hope and lives getting mown down on all sides, what grows taller in compensation are the tales.

In the end, “The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers’’ doesn’t quite conjure up a metaphysics to make its central device work. But perhaps we can forgive it that, for its smart, stylish storytelling, and for the way that, among its several resurrections, it brings to life an earlier era to speak to our own.

Greg Harris teaches writing at Harvard University.