"The Sorrows of an American" by Siri Hustvedt; Holt ($25)

___

With its lengthy explorations of psychoanalysis, the influence of dreams and the mechanics and messiness of art, "The Sorrows of an American" could have collapsed into a self-conscious postmodern mess had it not been written by the clear-eyed Siri Hustvedt. Author of the novels "The Blindfold," "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl" and the exquisite "What I Loved," Hustvedt is a precise but passionate writer, and "The Sorrows of an American" succeeds as a character-driven story as well as a fountain of provocative ideas. It is never less than strikingly poignant in its attempts to understand the factors that shape our lives.

As they often do, memories haunt Hustvedt's intelligent but wounded characters. A man mourns his father. His sister mourns her husband. The dead men possessed secrets that inspire two of the questions shaping this beguiling tale. But there are other, more metaphysical mysteries worth unraveling, or at least contemplating, questions on family and identity and how perceptions bend reality.

Like "What I Loved," "Sorrows" unfolds from the narrator's discovery of a letter. "I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it's better when they speak than when they don't," muses New York psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen, who, after his father's death, is unsettled to find an odd note in an unfamiliar hand among the old man's papers in Minnesota. The missive is from an unknown Lisa, and it is ominous: "Dear Lars, I know you will never ever say nothing about what happened. We swore it on the BIBLE."

The letter leaves Erik oddly vulnerable: to his patients, who are beginning to get under his skin, and to his attractive new tenant, Miranda, a Jamaican artist with a small daughter and, it appears, a stalker, who leaves disturbing photographs of the woman and little girl on Erik's doorstep.

Yet another set of letters endangers the peace of mind of Inga, Erik's widowed sister, in the form of notes sent by her famous writer husband, whom she and her teenage daughter Sonia still quietly mourn, one more openly than the other. Sonia's "perfectly folded sweaters organized by color, her radiant report cards, and sometimes brittle response to her mother's grief were pillars in an architecture of need," Erik reports, "structures built to fend off the ugly truths of chaos, death, and decay."

These elements, then, can be included among the sorrows of an American: chaos, death, decay. Sonia is still reeling not only from her father's fatal illness but also from the visions she witnessed from the windows of her lower Manhattan school that day in September 2001.

All losses end in heartbreak, though, devastating in myriad ways. Reading his father's letters, Erik learns of the horrors the old man endured during World War II and the pain he felt after the sale of the family farm.

"The lost forty acres hurt my father for the rest of his life. It wasn't that he pined for the missing land but that the effort to keep it had broken something in his father. He never said this, but I've come to believe that is what happened." Hustvedt writes in her acknowledgments that Lars Davidsen's letters are borrowed from the memoir her father wrote for his family, a bittersweet tribute.

Connection, though, is what Erik seeks. Since his divorce, he spends too much time by himself. "I'm so lonely," he says aloud as he walks through his house. "I'm so lonely." He longs for Miranda, who, kindly but firmly, keeps him at arm's length, even as her daughter Eglantine (or just Eggy) confides her strange little secrets - her father lives in a box; she hates being called Egg Yolk - and tries to tie down the shifting parameters of her small world with string.

"The Sorrows of an American" takes on elements of a suspense novel as the various mysteries unfold, but the real question is how we reconcile ourselves to the hard truths in our lives. Hustvedt's characters ponder such dilemmas thoroughly. They are educated and engaging, frequently discussing psychology and the "parallel existence" we inhabit in dreams.

They are also fond of quoting philosophers, a device that allows Hustvedt to get to the heart of her matter gracefully. "As Kant said, we can't get to the thing in itself, ever, but it doesn't mean there isn't a world out there," Inga tells her brother. "The problem is we're all blind, all dependent on preordained representations, on what we think we'll see. Most of the time, that's how it is. We don't experience the world. We experience our expectations of the world." Even if "the thing in itself" remains elusive, Hustvedt's lovely, compelling novel makes the search enlightening.