Two impulses are at work in the pages of Lynn Steger Strong’s third novel “Flight.” One of them is the story of a family: three grown siblings, who are – along with their spouses – wrestling with the question of what to do with their late mother’s house. There is decades’ worth of history among them, along with sharp class divides and long-simmering resentments; you could fill a doorstopper of a novel with the backstory and subtext here.

The second impulse is a stylistic one, and initially, it seems at odds with the first. Strong tells the story of “Flight” in a relatively pared-down manner, with nearly all extraneous detail stripped away. For a novel that abounds with lived-in details and in which the weight of mortality looms large, this approach might seem counterproductive. But one of the more intriguing aspects of “Flight” is how its austere style actually bolsters its overarching themes.

Local review

“Flight”
By Lynn Steger Strong
Mariner Books
$27.99

“Flight” opens on one of the couples at the heart of the novel, Tess and Martin, packing for a Christmas gathering. Through their terse conversation, we learn relatively early that there’s a strain in their relationship, and that it has to do with Martin’s job. Martin steps outside. “He thinks briefly he might call his mother,” Strong writes – and then explains why he doesn’t, and why Tess and Martin are traveling. “(T)hey’ll not be in Florida for Christmas for the first time in their lives because eight months ago their mother died.”

With those two moods – of familial tension and of relentless loss – Strong, who is the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College, sets the novel into motion. In turn, she introduces the other members of the family: Kate and Josh, who are struggling financially after a bad investment, and Alice and Henry, who are hosting the family for Christmas in upstate New York. Strong also introduces us to a mother and daughter, Quinn and Madeleine, whose connection to the family is gradually revealed over the course of the novel.

At times, Strong gives her prose a headlong rush, which can be disorienting – a cast of characters at the start of the novel would have been helpful. But there’s also a way in which that quality is entirely of a piece with the idea of numerous people jammed together in the same space with countless contradictory emotions duking it out in various conscious and subconscious minds. To wit:

“Tess catches sight of Kate’s van as Martin puts the car in park – Virginia plates, the back piled haphazardly with stuff –and her neck and shoulders clench. She loves but does not like Kate. She often fantasizes about maiming Josh.”

Gradually, that sense of chaos increases. Children go missing, for a time. People debate room assignments and sleeping arrangements. Martin ponders the breach of professional ethics that might end up costing him his job. Hovering over nearly all of this is the question of that Florida house, the gathering point of many a bygone Christmas, and what it might mean for all of them – a financial windfall, if sold, or a gateway to a more stable life, if occupied by one branch of the family.

Strong is a keen observer of the gradations of middle-class life, and of how unnerving the prospect of financial ruin might be (and is) for the adults in the family. This is one of the ways in which the plotline involving Quinn, a young single mother, meshes with the larger novel: it helps to illustrate the gulf between the three adult siblings and Quinn, whose life is much more precarious.

This isn’t the only way in which the characters and plot of “Flight” wrestle with larger questions. Alice, an artist-turned-social worker who is married to Henry, spends a lot of her time thinking about them – from questions of race (Alice is Black, Henry is white) to the obstacles the couple faced when trying to have a child. Strong manages to make the couples at the heart of the book both deeply idiosyncratic and emblematic of grander themes.

The title of “Flight” feels like an allusion to Dr. Jonas Salk’s famous quote about the importance of parents giving their children “roots and wings.” The family – and the families within that family – at the core of this book are still grieving and still struggling with loss, even as they grapple with other aspects of their everyday lives. Life is messy like that. Capturing that complexity in prose is no easy task, but this novel is up to the challenge.

New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of four books, most recently the novel “Ex-Members.” He has reviewed books for the New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.