Masterclass in deadpan observation

Fiction: Family - the ideal minefield for any novel. Tolstoy was right, the more complicated and/or unhappy, the better.

As families go, the Millers, are not so much unhappy as complicated, particularly as all three grown children have finally become involved in having babies of their own. For the two sons, the route to parenthood is not easy, science has played a major role for Jake, the fussy and financially successful middle child, while the eldest, Daniel, married to a younger woman and recently crippled following a road accident, has enlisted the services of a sperm donor. For the youngest Miller, Hilary, unlike her sisters-in-law, it was too easy, she was not seeking pregnancy and doesn't know who the father is.

The three siblings are about to meet up at Jake's holiday home off the coast of Maine, to celebrate the 75th birthday of their dad, Joe, a retired car salesman married to Ellen, the mother of the three grown Millers. Joe is a good man, a fine father and a loving husband. He also travels with his pet turtle, Babe.

Boston-based Heidi Pitlor's lively and convincing debut, The Birthdays, draws on all the established strengths of US domestic realism and adds some inspired characterisation. Above all, Pitlor is alert to the layers and asides that make up the stories of any individual life. This is a polished novel which achieves a feeling of spontaneity and is capable of viciously honest truths as well as civilised, old-style politeness and moments of reflection. In fact, it is within its beguiling good manners that many of the sharpest observations are to be found.

There are echoes of the best of Anne Tyler merged with a more sophisticated James Wilcox; yet Pitlor also manages to be individual.

When Ellen, still reeling from the discovery that her daughter, Hilary, is intending to be a single mother, attempts to react normally, she says "You've chosen the hospital? . . . You've got a good doctor?" Hilary replies, "No, Mom, I'm going to squat in the woods alone and have the baby there."

As may be suspected from this exchange, a great deal of exasperation is aired, yet Pitlor never forces the tone. Even the most awkward conversations between the couples - both Miller sons feel their wives have lost interest in them - sound believable. Pitlor, who works as an editor in a publishing house, demonstrates an understanding of how good fiction is structured - and has clearly grasped the dynamics of family tension with both humour, intelligence and nuanced nods to Updike and less obviously, Pinter.

It is a novel about people and Pitlor's characters never become secondary to their situations. Their personalities emerge as fully three dimensional. There is a strong sense of the past and the shared histories - and resentments - that have kept these people together - and apart. It is as complicated as any family drama - and very funny. Pitlor invented her characters and more importantly, she also knows them.

One by one, the respective players are introduced. Daniel and his wife Brenda, who is English, and an outsider, are co-existing in a web of pre-baby tension when we first meet them. Few debut novelists could match Pitlor's confidence in the opening domestic sequence which features a pivotal pancake breakfast and reveals a great deal about the couple by the use of some deceptively simple if loaded exchanges. Almost from the opening sentence, despite the flickering jokiness, a sense of Daniel's current unease is established. Here is a father to be who, fretting about the identity of the sperm donor who has fathered their future child, is now aware that his wife has begun to drift away from him.

Daniel fears the larger person his formerly small wife has become. Of course there is an explanation for his heightened insecurity. Now confined to a wheelchair, he has lost the use of his legs because of an accident that happened on the very day he had decided he had become too old to jog.

Pitlor looks at this relationship and then moves on. Her approach is disciplined but never slick. It is as if she sets out to release a generous amount of information and leaves characters in a holding zone before introducing her next party.

This second group consists of the parents, Joe and Ellen. Joe, whose impending 75th birthday is the reason for the reunion, is sitting at the kitchen table. "His flesh hung on his bones, sagging and folding with age." His wife, Ellen, a triumph of characterisation, enters the action with a less than charitable comment."Seventy-five years. You're an old man." His answer is suitably direct. "And you're an old lady" and as Pitlor records "what could she say to this?" Ellen, who works in a library, is ordinary, a mother who loves her cranky. middle-aged children. She is involved and interested, but most brilliantly, she also lives in her mind. Pitlor has created a woman whose thoughts shift between her fear of slipping off into death and her new preoccupation, romance. Ellen is in love with the husband of her recently dead friend.

Ellen's Walter Mitty-like musings of the "he loves me, he loves me not" variety counter the problems facing her obsessive, wealthy, judgmental son Jake who remains convinced he has never been loved sufficiently, the ongoing trouble of Daniel and the bewilderment caused by Hilary's chaotic life and impending motherhood. The narrative moves around each of these characters, as well as Jake's smug efficient wife Liz, who is about to have twins and Joe, the kindly earthed heart of the book.

Jake and Liz are also having difficulties as Liz has retreated from sex.

Pitlor makes the most of this impasse with a comic flair that never quite becomes as crude as it could. She displays the same skill when handing Hilary's messy sexual habits. Jake's expensively restored and stylishly furnished holiday house acts as a stage. Its snobbish surface perfection is all too fleeting, it stands ready to be devastated by the new grandchildren.

In ways, Pitlor has written a study about the impossibility of growing up. But The Birthdays is no thesis, it is a masterclass in deadpan, deft observation of human behaviour at its most fundamental - within a family. In the extraordinary character of Ellen a touching and often profound exploration of debilitating longing emerges, without a shard of sentimentality.

Three pregnancies, holding the promise of four babies, hover. It is a risky unifying device - at best it could be cloying, at worst, merely boring. One of the pregnancies, not entirely unexpectedly, collapses. Even here, at a point in which it would have been easy for Pitlor to falter into melodrama - she doesn't. Instead as an exhausted Daniel, for it is the donor sperm baby who dies, slumps across his wife's hospital bed, pondering his regrets, an irritated voice disperses his reverie, by informing him: "You're on my blanket." The narrative continues. "Daniel blinked himself awake. Brenda was leaning out of bed, yanking a thin white blanket from beneath his left wheel [of his wheel chair] . He pulled backward."

Here is a family story, much the stuff of real life, the characters are three dimensional, not all that likeable - with the exception of Joe and the wonderful Ellen - but believably human. More tested by themselves than by life - even allowing for their medical problems - the Millers are real. The Birthdays, written with sufficient natural ease and timing to offset the formidable precision, narative cohesion, structural detail and technique, possesses weird beauty, warmth and unnervingly punchy humour.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Birthdays By Heidi Pitlor Faber, 355pp. £12.99