In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2012 literary “thriller” (misnomer though this may be for a novel that is more suspenseful than actively thrilling) a moderately successful reporter finds his life upended when his sister sees a photo of a young girl who looks exactly like him. Haunted by the possibility that he has a daughter he never knew about, Gavin slides into a life of fraud, unemployment, and finally violence. The seeming stability of his life was just an illusion; in fact, it is a net, on which he rested for years but through which he can easily slip.

In this novel, the world of crime and poverty is distinct from, yet terrifyingly close to, the everyday world of law-abiding, middle-class citizens. The stories of Gavin, the other members of the jazz quartet that sustained him in high school, and the girl who disappeared while carrying the mysterious child, weave a tighter and tighter web that draws every character under the surface of the everyday. Mandel shows skillfully how the rest of society maintains itself only through a conspiracy of denial, in which people willfully refuse to see the addictions, abuse, and trauma that hide behind the closed doors of their neighbors’ homes.

The novel, whose prose doesn’t have quite the mature elegance of Mandel’s most recent work, the spare and gripping Station Eleven, doesn’t make its characters round enough to render fully convincing the mysterious self-destructive impulse that propels so many of them. But it is a sensitive, gripping portrayal of how fragile a construction American “normalcy” really is.