In her heavily researched sixth novel, J. Courtney Sullivan brings kaleidoscopic focus to a quaint and dreamy fictionalized version of Ogunquit. Jane, a research librarian at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, returns home to Awadapquit after the careful equilibrium she’s calibrated throughout her life comes undone: She’s been placed on leave at work, she and her husband have separated, and her mother recently passed away.

“The Cliffs,” By J. Courtney Sullivan. Knopf. $29

Back in town, Jane commences that final act of grieving — sorting through the bric-a-brac of her deceased mother’s home. As she prepares to sell the house, she butts up against the legacy her mother left behind, chiefly the alcohol use disorder that touched both her and her sister and has threaded throughout their lives.

Jane reconnects with her closest childhood friend, Allison, who runs a local inn. Catching up on the porch one evening, she meets the wealthy, preppy Genevieve, the picture of a summer person, who’s hiding from trouble at her dream home on Awadapquit’s picturesque cliffs. Their meeting proves fateful and plunges Jane inside of an increasingly complex mystery; Genevieve enlists Jane, the Harvard archivist, to research her home’s former residents.

A bit aimless at this juncture in her life and career, Jane is all too happy to entertain Genevieve’s request; besides, Genevieve lives in the formerly abandoned home that Jane snuck inside and dreamed about as a child and teenager. Little does Jane know that Genevieve is seeking help after her young son saw a ghost, causing them to flee.

Jane’s investigation unfolds the home’s interweaving layers of history. The book brings an appropriately rich texture to its exploration of place, examining what the land mean to tourists, locals and the Wabanaki people who were displaced from their home, as well as the climate implications as the water level continues to rise and flood the local beach parking lot at high tide. In fictionalizing Ogunquit, however, the book elides depicting its importance today as a site of queer history; while this is admittedly less central to the book’s core themes, it does present a missed opportunity given that the novel digresses into a sapphic Victorian love story toward the novel’s climax.

“The Cliffs” is interested in the visions people bring to Maine from out of state. Among the novel’s many compelling examinations of its multiple perspective characters is a passage on Genevieve’s overwhelming desire to superimpose the ultimate, HGTV dream home upon this decaying Victorian: “What she felt that day was a form of lust,” Sullivan writes. “Genevieve had to have it.” This homeowner’s mania culminates in the infinity pool she dreams of carving into the cliffside. When the builders reveal that the site is a burial ground, the pearl-clutching Genevieve doesn’t mind paying and looking away.

In presenting the locals’ vision of Awadapquit, the novel doesn’t quite transcend certain tropes about Maine but reinforces them. At times, the book falls victim to the “locals versus summer people” trope it aims to eschew and ends up with a vision of Maine that’s Hallmark- and Stonewall Kitchen-washed: candy shops and red pepper jams and folksy lobstermen who know what their town is really like, a vision that finds strange dissonance with Genevieve’s home renovation — how often does one ever find an infinity pool in York County?

While in its ambition “The Cliffs” risks pulling in too many ideas without giving each its full due, it excels in posing questions about historic preservation, which feel apt and appropriately complex amid the housing crisis in Maine and larger cultural movements, like Land Back, in response to the country’s colonial legacy. On the hunt to learn all they can about the women who lived in Genevieve’s home, the book moves from Awadapquit to Camp Mira, a fictionalized version of Maine’s spiritualist Camp Etna. Another chapter opens at Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining Shaker community in the world.

While the initial façades that Genevieve and Jane present in crafting their perfect homes — both in décor and in marriage — verge on saccharine, the book quickly finds its stride and unravels these façades to great effect. One of the novel’s richer examinations concerns the social realities women face, and it brings deft, nuanced compassion and scrutiny to the ways in which the women navigate these pressures. Genevieve presents as a snobbish, preppy out-of-towner. While her demeanor often repels others, she so desperately wants to connect that she ends up with mere acquaintances instead of a tight friendship like the one that binds Jane and Allison. Her social anxieties become a point of recognition and sympathy for Jane, who herself has leaned on alcohol as a social lubricant throughout her life to increasingly perilous effects.

To this end, the perspective of the novel becomes more polyphonic as it collages the accounts of numerous women into the telling of this place’s story, and the book becomes a project of recording women’s lives through various accounts — articles in decorating magazines, testimony at AA meetings, rare finds for the historical society. Herein lies the novel’s beating core, which makes the book a more propulsive read.

The prologue frames these themes. During a summer enrichment program at Bates College, a young Jane takes a seminar called “Early Women Writers,” whose subject serves almost as a mise-en-abyme for the book and inspires her career choices. Her professor “spoke the names of women from as far back as the sixteenth century who wrote down their life stories when no one thought it appropriate for women to write at all. By doing so, they endured.”

By intersecting a record of women’s lives with the story of a place, “The Cliffs” insists upon including women in a history that so often excludes them. The novel further intersects with class and race as it explores the lives of Wabanaki and Shaker women who lived and worked in Awadapquit. J. Courtney Sullivan takes to task how history and psychic resonance get whitewashed by superimposition and aspirational home design while detangling the knot of geology, history, race, and class that encircle this place.

Michael Colbert is a freelance writer based in Portland, where he’s at work on a novel. His writing appears in Vanity Fair, Esquire, and One Story.