Neighborhood Watch [-A novel about Cambodian immigrants]

In three previous novels and a book of short fiction, Gish Jen draped her characters’ troubles in a mood of antic good humor, then gradually allowed those troubles to reveal themselves. In “Typical American,” readers came to understand, through Jen’s adroit storytelling, the disappointments beneath the resilience of the Chinese immigrants Ralph and Helen Chang; in “Mona in the Promised Land,” Jen gave us the identity struggles of the couple’s American-born daughter. Still more complex were the varieties of emotional experience among the Wong family in “The Love Wife,” whose chorus of voices began with an exuberant clamor and ended up somber, reflective and hushed.

This expansiveness helped lend authority to Jen’s tales about the search for a true home in multiethnic America. Her genial family comedies were intimate but never small, and were never only comedies. In an interesting reversal, “World and Town” begins in an entirely different mood. Grief is all over, with a jittery under­tone of suspicion; and the novel’s humor, while plentiful, is most often edged in black.

In the spring of 2001, at age 68, Hattie Kong is mired in “a loneliness almost beyond words” after losing both her husband and her best friend to cancer. A retired high school biology teacher, she’s living alone in an apple-cheeked New England mountain town with the dopey name of Riverlake; her journalist son, Josh, checks in by phone every now and then, their conversations drifting into a mournful silence.

Busying herself with a few hobbies, her three dogs and regular walks with a group of local women, Hattie steels herself to endure mostly empty days. Then comes an inescapable disruption: the arrival of a Cambodian family, newly installed in a double-wide trailer on church-owned property just down the hill from Hattie’s house.