Early in "The Blue Window," Lorna — mother of troubled son Adam, daughter of cryptic mother Marika — tries to pack for a weekend trip. "It had been clear for some time that her overnight bag was not going to fit everything she needed, but for several minutes she tried to close it, anyway," Suzanne Berne writes. This moment perfectly captures the array of problems with which Lorna must contend; furthermore, it hints at the tumult, spillage, chaos and denial ahead. Later, the scene in which Adam traps a snake in an overturned pot has a similar effect.

Berne effortlessly switches from one point of view to another. Lorna's is a tone of contemplative sorrow — she defines Marika's absence during her childhood as "disappearance, not desertion." Nineteen-year-old Adam, meanwhile, for reasons that he initially refuses to divulge, longs to disappear entirely. When he agrees to join Lorna on a trip to Vermont to check on Marika's health, his reasoning is that in order for the self "to be vanquished, the self must submit to this ordeal."

Adam's nihilistic philosophizing is every bit as strong as Lorna's tacit consternation; Berne finds the right words every time. Adam's sections are distinct, in part, because he refers to his parents as "X" and "Y." His thoughts frequently appear in sentence fragments, as if he can't be bothered to commit to the full structure of subject and verb.

Marika's perspective is similarly truncated, a reflection of her reluctance to reconnect with her daughter. When Marika's nightmarish World War II experience in Amsterdam appears on the page, she is referred to only as "Rika," putting even more distance between the two versions of herself.

Berne's prose explores familial bonds with deep feeling but without sentimentality, and her portraits of marriage are astonishingly good. Lorna, scrounging to feel sympathy for her icy mother, imagines Marika's disappointment in her husband: "He would bring her, at eighteen (nineteen?), to live in an old house in a Virginia backwater run by an addled old lady toddling around in a housecoat and flat sneakers."

The descriptions of Lake Champlain, numerous and vivid and never tiresome, act as breaths of fresh air for the reader. Public humiliations, private horrors and physical illness abound; nearly all communication is laced with secrets and misunderstandings. Both Marika and Adam contend with the notion of "facts" — Marika in a euphemistic and dismissive way, Adam as a way to anchor himself in the present.

"The past does not exist," he says at one point, and immediately considers the thought "pretentious." The past, of course, infuses every word that this family says (or doesn't), and every decision they make in this carefully crafted, complex novel.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

The Blue Window

By: Suzanne Berne.

Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 257 pages, $27.