Of all the bizarre stories to emerge from 9/11, few were more jarring than the revelation that the hijacker Mohammed Atta and his fellow jihadists spent a considerable amount of time and money in Florida strip clubs while preparing for the attacks. The idea that these holy warriors lavished Osama Bin Laden’s cash in places with names such as The Pink Pony and the Cheetah Club suggests there was always more to the story than a cut-and-dried clash of warring cultures.

The scenario clearly intrigues Andre Dubus III, who uses it as the basis for his powerful new novel. Dubus, the author of the critically acclaimed House of Sand and Fog, sets his action almost entirely over the course of one endless night during the week before the attacks. The action centres around the Puma Club, a strip joint in a backwater of the Florida coast. It is the workplace of April Connors, an enterprising young dancer who performs under the name of Spring. It is also the haunt of AJ Carey, a down-and-out construction worker, who spends money he can’t afford on a stripper named Marianne, his dreams of a happy life with her outside the club clearly about to turn into a nightmare. An even more ominous patron is Bassam, a dour young Saudi jihadist who has been studying at a nearby flight school and flashes a roll of $100 bills that he will soon no longer need.

Matters come to a head when April has to bring her three-year-old daughter Franny to work after being let down by a baby-sitter. Through a terrifyingly plausible sequence of misunderstandings, the child winds up in the custody of AJ while her mother is involved in a private performance for Bassam. Police are summoned, and for a tantalising few moments Bassam is taken into custody in the frenzied hunt for the child, potentially averting the attack to come. But the search soon turns elsewhere, since this is still a time when American tragedies were small, and the enemy seemed local.

Dubus’s novel is at its best as it focuses on the sordid but compelling drama that plays out between AJ and April, two people who meet briefly in the stylised choreography of a lap dance. Dubus wisely avoids any temptation to sentimentalise April, whose protestations that she strips only to support her daughter ring hollow when she is challenged by, of all people, Bassam. Like everyone else at the Puma, she is caught up in a whirlpool of ready money and sex.

With AJ, meanwhile, Dubus has created a character who possesses such epic self-delusional faculties that you cannot help but be mesmerised by his every step. His dusk-to-dawn odyssey as he tries to win the heart of a stripper, make peace with his estranged wife and “save” a stranger’s lost child is a masterful depiction of ruined manhood struggling to keep from sinking into the rubbish heap of American society.

The author’s efforts to capture the soul of his Muslim extremist prove less successful. There is no doubting he has done his research while creating Bassam, but the would-be hijacker remains an elusive character, who only really comes to life during a creepy intimate moment when he offers April hundreds of dollars to let him touch her caesarean scar. This is due primarily to the “close third-person” narrative voice Dubus uses while describing his actions, which strives for authenticity but comes across as stilted: “The dancing woman on the stage wears nothing but the hat of cowboys.” Too often, the language has the doctrinaire tone of a pronouncement slipped to Al-Jazeera for broadcast, leaving us to wonder what this troubled young man is really thinking after the prayers and propaganda grow silent.

That said, The Garden of Last Days remains a compelling portrait of a group of dead-enders brought together by a profound desperation that easy money, abundant flesh and blind violence cannot assuage. For all the contact and exposure that takes place in the pulsating light of the Puma Club, it is a place where people stay absolute mysteries to one another.

The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
Heinemann £17.99 pp544