A family portrait sketched in muted tones

With her latest novel, Ursula Hegi affirms the storytelling gifts so famously on display in her bestselling, Oprah-chosen 1997 novel, “Stones From the River.” Although Hegi isn’t the kind of writer whose fiction offers one dazzling sentence after another, but in “Sacred Time,” she proves that a gripping, well-structured tale can go a long way.

The story follows 50 years in the lives of an Italian American family in the Bronx, beginning with a dismal winter in 1953 and a dreamy, self-possessed boy named Anthony Amadeo. Hegi sets the reader up for a domestic comedy starring a cast of off-kilter, quirkily drawn characters. When tragedy strikes instead, she examines how the remnants of grief, violence and guilt can linger even over decades.

As the novel opens, Anthony’s paternal Aunt Floria and her 8-year-old twins, Bianca and Belinda, move into the Amadeos’ apartment after Floria’s husband is sent to prison for theft. The transition is hardly easy; Floria and Anthony’s mother, Leonora, constantly scream at each other “like opera divas,” Anthony observes. “But we were used to them being quick-tempered with each other and then confiding and dancing as if they were the closest of friends.”

Worse for 7-year-old Anthony is that Bianca and Belinda move into his room, invading his space with things that repel him: candy lipsticks, dolls, a pet rabbit and an accordion. Initially, he and the twins bicker but tolerate each other. One day, though, pretending to be Superman, Bianca leans against a window in the family’s fifth-floor apartment. Anthony tells his cousin that she can fly out the window to find her father. She believes him and falls to her death.

What ensues is much more than grief: Layer upon layer of buried familial problems and secrets rise to the surface. Everyone believes Bianca’s death to be an accident, but Anthony knows the truth and must live with it.

Then there is Leonora’s unbearable guilt: “So much had felt like punishment since Bianca’s death. Punishment of the parent who had not lost a child.” As for Belinda, she nervously watches over her mother and becomes preoccupied with making dolls, one of which eerily resembles her late sister.

The marital strife between Anthony’s parents becomes more apparent. Leonora suspects Victor of being unfaithful; the truth is even worse than she expected. She finds a lover, a much younger man. Floria, tired of standing by a man who isn’t even around, has her own romantic plans.

A grown-up Belinda feels no closer to her mother: “As conspirators, Mama and I did well; but our natural stance was flight and chase. I still fled from her sorrow, because I didn’t want it to ignite mine. I couldn’t be her substitute for Bianca; and yet I was the only one who looked like Bianca.”

As the novel progress, a grown-up Belinda even admits to herself that sometimes she feels hatred for her sister: “Because she was dead. Because they were in love with her absence.... [A] dead daughter was more powerful than a daughter still alive.”

Ultimately the characters in “Sacred Time” move toward forgiveness, which involves bluntly facing what they perceive as past sins. Anthony, who has refused to trade “confession for atonement,” has the most difficult reckoning of all. He relives Bianca’s death over and over, revising that fatal moment in his imagination so that he stops her from going out the window.

Hegi allows Anthony some measure of peace but doesn’t use sentimental tactics to get him there. He must deal with his wife, Ida, who knows that his cousin died young but doesn’t fully know the circumstances. And he must find a way to explain the past to his son, Joey, from whom he has kept secrets in order to protect him -- “although I suspect what continues to harm long beyond the act of violence is silence,” Anthony says. And he must come to terms with his mother, in whose eyes he sees “a legacy of sins no son should have to imagine for his mother.”

The author deftly explores the subtle, unexpected ways in which people are undone in the wake of tragedy and the self-destructive impulses to which they yield out of helplessness. Her characters are hardened by grief, rather than united by it. Fortunately, their struggles are not neatly wrapped in a tidy ending. Instead, as Anthony comes to understand, Bianca’s death “seized all of us and flung us down in strange formations from where we’ve struggled to come back to what was once familiar. It was different for every one of us. There was no clarity, no common focus, only conflicting angles of vision, colliding and aligning.... “

In the end, Hegi does what any good storyteller would do: She leaves certain matters unresolved, leading readers to imagine a life for her characters beyond the novel’s conclusion. In doing so, Hegi suggests that the Amadeos are left neither happier nor wiser after enduring their troubles. They simply go on, as most of us do. *