Joann Kobin’s debut novel unfolds with plainspoken clarity and no theatrics. Her 11 stories are self-contained portraits of a contemporary American family as it navigates the affections and abrasions that typically define close familial relationships. She writes with impressive honesty, and she nails down the tense psychological rumblings of a household’s dissolving and ultimately reshaping itself (Kobin is a Northampton psychotherapist). The novel’s strength lies in its depictions of the scars and resentments — sometimes buried far below consciousness, sometimes expressed in obvious passive-aggression — that can keep a family bickering year upon year. Unfortunately, the writing style tends toward the drably functional, so that the novel’s substance conveyed without much eloquence or poetry.

Although each story can be read in isolation, when you put them together the effect is like looking at a painting from slightly different angles. The stories tend to overlap, recounting the same details but from different years and sometimes through different eyes. The central narrator is Harriet, and most of the stories flow from her perspective, as she reflects on life with and without ex-husband Phillip, children Matina and Eric, grandmother Belle, and Phillip’s young second wife, Marianne.

The novel opens with " Rain, " at the funeral service for Harriet’s father-in-law, Roger. Harriet’s mind wanders back to how Roger once ogled her. " Okay, so Roger thought I was a sexy dish that summer afternoon in Huntstown. I didn’t mind and Phillip didn’t seem to mind that his father was flirting with me. I hadn’t had a father since I was eight and being paid attention to felt fine with me. " Then, after Roger tries to conclude matters by slipping Harriet $100 to buy another sexy outfit, she gets pissed off. She goes on to concede that she " wanted to be adorable and strong. " Early on, then, Harriet presents herself as a woman whose sense of self hinges on how she’s perceived by others, particularly men.

" Charity Work " harks back to the summer when she was eight and her parents rented a cottage on the Jersey shore. Here the simplicity of Kobin’s utilitarian style evokes a young girl’s growing disillusionment with her mother, who wants to instill in Harriet the value of charity work but who herself can’t volunteer because she can’t " find a hospital where the patients aren’t so sick and where the nurses are nice. " When Harriet saves up money to buy a Mickey Mouse doll and her mother forces her to spend it on ice cream for sick children, she angrily concludes that " You weren’t supposed to want anything — that’s what I was beginning to learn. The less you wanted and the more you gave away, the more wonderful you were. " In December, her father takes off, and Harriet reflects, " Once in a while I believed it was because of me, because I was selfish, because I didn’t want to do charity work. " It’s a wrenching moment that explains a lot about Harriet’s uneasiness with herself and where she stands in the eyes of the people close to her.

In " What I Learned from Clara, " Harriet, Phillip, and the kids move to Richmond, Virginia, where their elderly neighbor has a yappy Pomeranian and a need to try to communicate with Harriet, who strains to distance herself. At one point, Clara says, " And your children get older and become more like regular people. You go on loving them but there are times you don’t always like them. " Harriet silently proclaims, " At that moment, I knew I wasn’t like Clara: I adored my children, I always would. I’d always like them, too. " Years later, however, she chokes on that smug self-righteousness when her daughter, Matina, gets pregnant. By that point, Harriet has become so infuriated by what she perceives as Matina’s self-importance, and she so yearns to be a grandmother, that her internal voice screams, " I love the baby more than I love you, Matina. "

Given all her self-doubt and her unspoken aches and bruises, Harriet can be exasperating. Woman Made of Sand succeeds on that count: the characters transcend the colorlessness of the writing style, often leaping right off the page. Whether you like them or not, they stick with you.