Cynthia Zarin’s debut novel, “Inverno,” is a beautiful, tricky, compressed gem of a book that seems determined to upend your expectations of it. Though it’s short, it follows its two characters across decades. Though it’s mostly set in New York, it makes abrupt detours to Italy and Somalia. Though a romance is at its center, the prevailing mood is heartbreak and a chilliness implied by its title – Italian for “winter.”

And though “Inverno” is Zarin’s first novel, it carries the grace and intellectual heft of her decades as a poet, where she’s specialized in elegant, fragile, metaphorically rich verse, in the vein of Louise Glück or Elizabeth Bishop. Emphasis on fragile for this novel: Its two lead characters seem to be forever on the brink. We first meet the protagonist, Caroline, in the early 2010s walking through a snowy Central Park, waiting for a call from an ex-lover, Alastair. The reason for their impending talk isn’t entirely clear – a tryst? a reconciliation? a fight? – but Caroline’s need is urgent and sensual. She “had her cell phone in her glove so that she would feel it on her palm if he called.”

From there, the novel begins to flow backward and forward in time, sometimes shifting course in the middle of a paragraph. The images that emerge start to shed light on the pair’s lives, but only dimly, as if everybody is hesitant to confess their past sins. Caroline is a well-off New Yorker, married twice, unhappily, and the product of an abusive home. Alastair suffered a closed-off mother and was so desperate to escape as a child that one night he headed to Central Park and, absurdly, attempted to carve out a hiding place with a pen knife. A lifelong urge to spread outward has gripped him – he grew up to become a journalist, thinking for a time he’d move to Somalia. It’s not entirely clear if, for Caroline, he’s the one who got away or a bullet she’s dodged.

Processing all this, Caroline can’t seem to keep her memories under control: “The truth changes as she gets hold of it, like a kite or a snake; it does not like to be held, it thrashes.” Zarin’s book does much the same, which is sure to exasperate some readers – the book returns, fuguelike, to Caroline’s waiting in the snowy park, only for her mind to rocket off in a new direction. She might meditate on the fairy tale of the Snow Queen or on songs about telephones. She recalls a trip to see a play in Minneapolis and another to attend Alastair’s wedding. She offers oblique musings on her failed romances and “the endless permutations of the ways an ordinary house can become a smoking ruin.”

In the same way that the plot of “Inverno” involves obsession with the past, the novel itself is something of a throwback. Its stream-of-consciousness narration evokes Virginia Woolf or Italo Calvino, and its meta structure – we get glimpses of an author writing Caroline and Alastair into existence – suggests the postmodern experimentalists who followed their lead. (I suspect it’s no accident that the story casually mentions a speedboat – “Inverno” is a close cousin to Renata Adler’s 1976 cult classic, “Speedboat,” another slim novel that featured a busy-brained, unlucky-in-love New Yorker and a hyper-fragmented narrative.)

But this is very much Zarin’s book, marked by a lyricism that turns its deliberate disarray into a kind of poetic logic – Caroline and Alastair’s lives are like line breaks, snapped off in unexpected places. Alastair’s instinct for self-sabotage is severe; we learn that he has intentionally infected himself with poison ivy and flagellated himself with a belt. Caroline describes him, at one point, as a “madman.” But in the moments when their lives brush together, all that pain practically sings: When “Caroline put her arms around Alastair steamy from the shower, his hand at his throat where he had just loosened his tie, she felt the small lizard of fear, a tiny hunch, skitter across his shoulder blades.” The mood is so gentle yet intense that Caroline kissing his shirt on the shoulder feels like a deeply erotic act.

Such fleeting moments highlight how this is ultimately a story about fracture, about how hard it is to connect across time and distance. “This world like a knife,” Zarin writes more than once, implying that we’re always at risk of a schism. The siblings in the Snow Queen story are separated; all those songs about telephones are about the person on the other end of the line who’s not picking up.

A different, more conventional novel might make Caroline and Alastair’s story less opaque and put their romance in clearer context. But that would make for a less graceful, less universal book. Zarin’s approach dispenses with a story arc, but for a purpose: to question the stories we spin about our love relationships.

Beyond that somber theme, “Inverno” is also lavish with detail, filled with gorgeous imagery of New York in winter and family gatherings in sultry summers. (One beautiful passage tracks the paths of ants and fireflies on a porch on a warm night.) The novel evokes the Joseph Cornell shadow boxes that Zarin mentions early on, beautiful but abstract dioramas of stray mementos. It makes for a lovely story, if one that requires accepting the idea that any honest reckoning with our lives is told out of time, splintered and unfinished.

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”

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