In the author's note to her debut novel, "The Quickening," Michelle Hoover reveals that the novel was inspired by her great-grandmother's written reflections: "15 pages in all, poorly typed." Born in 1880, Hoover's great-grandmother spent her life farming in Iowa with her husband. The reflections were written as she lay dying, the world around her having grown unrecognizable: "And now here I am in February 1950 ... begging God every day to take me to him."

"The Quickening" is not a nonfictional account, but Enidina, one of the two farm wives who narrate the story, has a similar trajectory to Hoover's great-grandmother. Left alone on her Iowa farmstead in 1950, Enidina records in a notebook memories of her life, beginning with her marriage and arrival to the farm. There is only one other family for miles, and Enidina is encouraged to befriend the neighboring wife, Mary. Stoic Enidina feels little need for company, but Mary is filled with restlessness and longing.

Mary shares the narration with Enidina, and the reader is allowed to see each character from the other's perspective. Despite their similar position as isolated farm wives, the characters clash more than they come together. Mary has children easily but feels little connection to them or to her violent husband, Jack. Enidina desires little more than to work hard and build a family, but she struggles to carry a baby to term: "I knew only the shame of it." Each woman resents the other, but they are unable to avoid each other completely; in a small community, neighbors are invariably tangled up in each other's lives.

Perhaps that is why "The Quickening" is able to keep the reader edgy and interested, despite the quiet nature of the women's lives. In such an isolated world, where World War I barely registers ("it was hard to be certain of anything outside our own 180 acres of land"), every event has terribly high stakes. Killing a pig, starting a rumor: These events reverberate for years.

In its deceptively simple, hypnotic prose and its attempt to understand, through fiction, the inner lives of long-lost rural characters who left few records behind, "The Quickening" inevitably recalls "So Long, See You Tomorrow," William Maxwell's fictional re-creation of a crime that took place in Maxwell's hometown of Lincoln, Ill.

"The Quickening" does not quite have Maxwell's structural ambition: the author's note is the only place where Hoover weaves in her own perspective, whereas Maxwell makes his attempts to understand the past a vivid part of the novel itself. However, both novels use fiction as way to communicate with the past. "I consider this novel a restoration," Hoover writes, a "pursuit of what otherwise might have vanished."

Laura C.J. Owen is a Minneapolis writer.