Delphine de Vigan's smart new novel, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, was published in France in 2009. Its events take place on one day (and the night before it) when two psychically damaged Parisians arrive at the same spot at the same time. It's an incisive look at the "diffraction" of contemporary urban life -- an odd but apt word De Vigan employs, signifying in both English and French a kind of breaking apart. As Thibault, an eight-fingered paramedic, thinks of his own circumstance: "From a distance it seems to possess unity and direction. ... But close up, his life looks confused, it splits into fragments, there are pieces missing."

The novel opens in contemporary Paris on the eve of May 20, and 40-year-old Mathilde, deputy director of a marketing corporation, is unable to sleep. She's waiting for a change in her life, as predicted by the clairvoyant she uncharacteristically visited not long ago. For the past nine months she's been marginalized at work by her spiteful boss, who's sidelined her for disagreeing with him at a critical meeting. Since that fateful day, Jacques has steadily been making her life at work untenable.

On this same night, Thibault, at age 43, is making a life-altering decision: He's been involved in a relationship that's going nowhere, to his despair. Lila responds to him physically, but she cannot reciprocate his love. As he sits on the toilet of the hotel in Honfleur where he's taken her on holiday, he decides that in the morning he'll finally break it off with her.

Alternate chapters are devoted to Mathilde and to Thibault as De Vigan spins out their parallel tales. These two lonely urbanites, both of whom have reached a point almost beyond hope, make their way around the crowded city -- Mathilde, in the Parisian Metro, jostled by the faceless crowds below the city's streets; Thibault, in his Renault, stopped dead in traffic behind delivery trucks en route to the dingy apartments of patients who seek his company as much as his medical expertise.

The novel moves relentlessly toward the convergence of these two dispossessed souls in a "strange sort of choreography." The novel has been translated from French into a very British English -- with words like lifts and loos and tyres, as well as alien-sounding phrases like "sachets of salt." But De Vigan's lucid take on the fragility of our purchase on happiness and the frenzied madness of our cities clearly comes through in this bracingly acerbic novel.

Kathryn Lang is former senior editor of the Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas.