Ottawa writer Rita Donovan’s previous novels, Dark Jewels and Daisy Circus, broke through the small press ranks to win media praise and regional book prizes. Her third, Landed, displays a mature narrative confidence, using an ensemble of voices to track three generations of a divided family living on either side of the U.S.-Canadian border. The story’s strengths, however, are marred by a sometimes listless, sometimes self-indulgent prose style that tests the reader’s patience.

The novel begins with matriarch Rose Anderson explaining how her decision to settle in the northern bush town of Warroad, Minnesota, constituted rebellion to her Minneapolis sisters. This kind of leave-taking – personally necessary, but perplexing to those left behind – reverberates in the destinies of Rose’s two sons. Easygoing Ray volunteers to fight in Vietnam while Luke drops out of university and joins the anti-war underground, eventually fleeing to Canada with his pregnant girlfriend.

After Ray is killed, Luke and his parents find they have lost their family mediator: the geographic and psychic distances between them become virtually unbroachable, despite Rose’s best efforts. Troubled Luke becomes permanently unsettled, unable to remain even with the family he creates for himself in Canada.

Donovan’s uncompromising psychological realism is the most striking aspect of Landed. Her refusal to fully justify or remedy the Anderson family’s estrangement may subvert readerly expectation, but the resonances between the characters’ monologues explore shared traits far more convincingly than any tearful reunion.

Still, the language with which Donovan delineates each family member is wildly uneven. From rather flat and uninspired for a quiet character like Rose, it then surges into undisciplined lyrical flights around Luke. Also edging into overkill is Donovan’s mining of images from her border setting – islands, rock formations, and bodies of water – to demonstrate the primal connections between arbitrarily separated things. As rich as natural images can be, a deeper, more imaginative approach is required to restore them to full metaphoric power. Donovan’s best passages suggest that she is up to this task, so it is all the more disappointing that she cannot sustain the quality of her writing throughout.