“Whole lives are born out of coincidence.” That is the unfortunate premise of this unfortunately titled third novel by Kristen den Hartog. Coincidence is very thin gruel on which to base a story, particularly when the writer clearly has the talent to manage without cheap tricks. But den Hartog seems unable to resist.

This is an interesting problem. Four years ago, the renowned critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in The New Republic, commented on the disturbing tendency toward coincidence in the work of not just Smith but Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and other contemporary authors. “An endless web” of connection, he wrote, seems to be all these writers need for meaning. “The different stories all intertwine, and double and triple on themselves. Characters are forever seeing connections and links and plots, and paranoid parallels.”

Although this can be entertaining, Wood believes the insistence on coincidence masks an inability (or unwillingness) of certain authors to come to grips with the rigour of creating believable characters.

In Origin of Haloes, den Hartog takes an extremely eloquent and heartrending story of family breakup in a small Ontario town and decks it out in, of all things, Olympic finery. Because her heroine, young Kay Clancy, happens to have been a top gymnast at her Deep River high school before getting pregnant by her coach, den Hartog gives the novel a complicated superstructure that traces Kay’s obscure little life in terms of the six Olympic Games held between Rome 1960 and Moscow 1980.

This leaves the reader being asked to consider the staggering irrelevance of parallels such as this: “Eighty-three countries participated [at Rome], bringing 5,338 competitors through the ancient arches…. Not one of them was Kay Clancy, though she often claimed she’d had what it took.”

Den Hartog also insists (and insists is the operative word here, since she seems incapable of truly integrating her forced parallels into her characters’ lives) on finding resonance between the cluster of Deep River lives she is concerned with and the gods and heroes of ancient Greece and Troy. Some action of Kay’s “complicated the cycle of consequence …[which] circled back to the beginning of time and beyond,” and we’re into the story of Orestes, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, and Cassandra, which den Hartog tells in detail and then drops abruptly with the gods laughing at their pitiful mortal “dolls.” Other parallels are even more banal: “She could see the river from her window, the way the Pope could see the Tiber from his.”

The annoying thing about all this is that none of it is necessary. The small coincidences that occur within a rural Ontario community of 5,000 souls are quite enough to go on from a fictional point of view (as Alice Munro has been demonstrating brilliantly throughout her career), and den Hartog plays those resonances with art and skill. Young Kay is impregnated by her coach, Russell Halliwell, but lets her boyfriend and later husband, Joe LeBlanc, believe that the baby’s father is actually Robbie Hayes, a classmate from high school. From that single lie sprouts a dark plant of deceit, loss, and tragedy that involves and entwines all three families.

The novel’s strength is its powerful rendering of the effects of parental loss on the young children in both the Halliwell and LeBlanc families. After Joe walks out on his family and disappears in a canoe one day, his children are constantly catching glimpses of him or parts of him – a hairy hand through a window, a pair of legs behind the garden greenery, a phantom presence on an Ottawa street (helping a young Margaret Trudeau lift the stroller that contains baby Michel!). In the Halliwell household across town, young Eddie, too fat and unathletic to merit his jock father’s attention, evolves into a rake-thin and tormented artist who escapes Deep River never to return.

The only part of the artificial superstructure that works is den Hartog’s fascinating description, near the end of the novel, of the mythological origins of the gods and goddesses of Mount Olympus. If they ever knew it, most readers will probably have forgotten the appalling cycle of incest, castration, patricide, pedophagy, and murderous jealousy that preceded the long, troubled reign of Zeus and Hera.

Den Hartog’s attempt to link this lurid tale to that of her Deep Riverites is predictably obvious – “Life went on up there as scandalously as it did down below” – but it is exhilarating to be reminded of the sheer bloody-mindedness of the gods our early Western ancestors created for themselves. No writer I’m aware of has ever been able to create believable parallels between the Olympians and their human reflections. Except for Homer, who did not a bad job of it.