July 27 (Bloomberg) -- On its face, Ken Kalfus's new novel, ``A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,'' is a dark comedy about a rabidly antagonistic couple caged together in their Brooklyn Heights apartment while lawyers slowly and expensively hammer out their divorce agreement. But Kalfus, as the title makes clear, has meatier themes in mind. Like Don DeLillo in ``White Noise,'' he's using the misfortunes of one family as a pathway into the national malaise. And there's a lot of malaise for him to consider. Sept. 11 (which begins the book), the anthrax scare (Chapter 2), the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- these events reverberate like a steady, unnerving drumbeat, sometimes soft, sometimes deafening, underneath the plot. This is a serious, fine, flawed, funny book whose good and bad points are probably impossible to disentangle.