Face to face

SINCE Freud and Jung, the novel has concerned itself with the self, an increasingly complicated subject after World War II, which, like other wars but more so, fractured families and communities and selves. Jung was a great believer in secrets and their critical role in forming the self, rather like the grit in the oyster shell that becomes a pearl. That journey -- grit to pearl -- forms the dramatic arc of many a 20th century novel.

Siri Hustvedt's "The Sorrows of an American" is one such novel, though here in the 21st century it seems a little old-fashioned in its sources of drama and tension. Peopled with intellectuals, authors, psychoanalysts and their patients and set in TriBeCa and Brooklyn, it seems a precious diorama, like something you might see in the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History. And yet, and yet, the pages turn themselves. The old story, the search for the self, holds water once again.

Ghosts, ancestors, secrets and stories. Ghosts are to ancestors what secrets are to stories. A little understanding, a little psychoanalysis, can bring the mystery and fear into the broad light of day, turning ghosts into ancestors. A little imagination, some empathy, a little emotional flesh on the bones of characters, a bit of narrative, can turn secrets into stories. Families are their repositories, and novels weave them into a work of art. Not true stories, necessarily, but a reflection of the author -- the author's self, refracted.

A novel, like a family, can be a kind of reliquary. Hustvedt writes in her Acknowledgments that some of the passages in this novel were taken from the memoirs of her father, who died in 2003. "In this sense," she writes, "after his death, my father became my collaborator." Hustvedt, who has written three previous novels, volunteers at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City, where she teaches a writing workshop. She also thanks her students as well as the psychoanalysts and neuroscientists who informed this novel with their expertise.

Psychoanalyst Erik Davidsen, the novel's narrator, is, like his creator, a Brooklyn resident and the descendant of Scandinavian immigrants. When the novel opens, Erik's father, Lars, has just died. Erik is very close to his sister, Inga, a philosopher and writer, whose husband, Max Blaustein, a famous novelist, died five years earlier. Their daughter, Sonia, is 18. Max left several secrets -- possible affairs and children -- in his illustrious wake. Lars also left secrets and regrets: an unjust killing he witnessed during the war and something much darker, from his childhood in the Midwest. His journals help Erik piece together the story of his father's life.