Much has been made of the fact that Sam Savage had to wait until he was 65 to get his first real taste of literary success. But instead of dwelling on what might have been, it is far more productive to consider what we have. Savage's lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age. His mature and complex characters — including his most famous, the autodidact rat of "Firmin" (2006) — are nourished by hard-won experience and philosophical insight. Like their creator, they have lived.

Savage's newest novel, "It Will End With Us," continues this tradition. His first-person narrator is Eve, an aging grande dame of the American South who is trying to piece together her past from a series of loose, random memories. We hear of her privileged childhood and the games she played with her two brothers. There are fond accounts of the family home, Spring Hope, which has the size, splendor and nostalgic allure of Daphne du Maurier's Manderley. Looming over everything is the resurrected image of Eve's literary mother, Iris, a formidable mentor (and terrible snob) who tells her husband, "We are not ordinary people" and instills in her daughter a love of art and books.

The novel's first line — "I wasn't going to begin again" — is redolent of the beginning of Savage's last novel, "The Way of the Dog" (2013): "I am going to stop now." Both books unfold in fits and starts, each isolated paragraph a short flurry of ideas, observations and impressions — certainly more thoughts than deeds. Savage's structure works better here as those stubby paragraphs resemble fragmented memories (or, as Eve calls them, "figments"). The deeper Eve plunges down memory lane, the more diversions she encounters. One recollection begets another, from Eve's first word to her first taste to the recalled vision of her father, "a short twisted wound-up man stuffed with coiled springs."

Eve's figments cohere, and at the center of the full picture we see her viewing her mother as a failed poet fantasizing about a life that "fate, my father, and the South had denied her." Once again, then, Savage presents an artist thwarted by art and hampered by regret. However, this revelation comes too late to make any considerable impact, and the fallout — Iris' madness, a ruptured family — is only lightly sketched. In short, the novel's composite parts satisfy more than the final whole.

But what parts. The better ones are lyrically imbued and range from concise summations ("the mortuary silence of winter") to protracted evocations ("the green-tinted air on the vine-darkened lower porch"). In Savage's novel, or Eve's "inventory of tiny things," it is the small, fleeting and quiet details that speak volumes.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.