Jon McGregor, a quiet English star who made it onto the Booker Prize long list at the age of 26, should be more famous here. Mr. McGregor’s work is about the world outside the limelight: His first novel was pointedly titled “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things” (2006).

Although his gradual and almost pious style has more in common with the likes of William Maxwell, it was Douglas Coupland, author of “Generation X” (1991), who inspired Mr. McGregor. He reads “Generation X” as a critique of irony, not a celebration. That book “made a lack of ambition seem pure and necessary,” he said.

This ambitious lack of ambition, self-defeating as it may sound, finds full and long fruition in Mr. McGregor’s second book, “So Many Ways To Begin” (Bloomsbury, 343 pages, $23.95), a novel that captures our common narrative impulse. Everyone has a story to tell — and it is about themselves.

David Carter, a young boy growing up in Coventry immediately after World War II, loves to pick around in craters, bringing odd bullets and bits of shrapnel back home for safekeeping. He wants to start his own museum, and he doesn’t understand why other boys do not. “It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time.”

David begins to collect artifacts from his own life: a postcard, a household list, a wage slip, a pair of movie tickets. These become Mr. McGregor’s chapter headings; David tells his story while rooting through his old boxes, remembering. Some objects come from before David’s time: two telegrams from 1939 and 1940 summon a dazzling memory from David’s Aunt Julia. As she teaches David to waltz, she recalls a “hotel ballroom just off the Strand, its high domed ceiling frescoed pale skyblue with wisps of spindrift clouds.” There she met Major William Pearson, and still waltzing with David, she narrates their courtship, marriage, and his eventual death as one blur of a dance, with her parents chaperoning from a nearby table. Mr. McGregor’s specialty is the moving anecdote. The more than 60 tightly marshaled episodes that make up this sweeping novel make one wonder what he would be like as a short story writer.

At age 22, David learns that he was adopted. Deeply upset, he shuns his mother. Here Mr. McGregor’s slow burn of a novel becomes painful. Now an artifact himself, untagged, of unknown origin, David finally curates his first professional exhibition, “Refugees, Migrants, New Arrivals,” at the local museum. Soliciting material from local immigrants, David discovers that there are many like himself. Children of the recently dead bring their parents’ memorabilia to the museum “assuming that because these objects had belonged to someone who was no longer alive, they would take on a historical importance.” Faced with a glut of details about other people’s parents, David looks for more information on his own in archives across the land.

The will to preserve and remember animates Mr. McGregor’s narrative. As a curator, David cultivates “the skill needed to draw a visitor through a collection of objects and bring them out with a lived sense of one particular moment in time.” This might as well be a statement of Mr. McGregor’s art. As historical fiction, “So Many Ways To Begin” is neither fusty nor fantastic. The title’s implication of multiple starting points keeps the resurrected decades breathing. Chance encounters — meeting a major at a waltz or, in David’s case, a girl in a museum’s café — keep David wondering “what other story he would have ended up with” if things had been different. Chaos is the miraculous mode of unsorted artifacts, the “much smaller cues,” the “history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record.” He is fascinated by the limits of his science.

Despite these limits, David is left with a substantial story to tell by the time he is 55. Using the Internet, that radically nonphysical archive, David finds a woman who may be his biological mother. The novel we have been reading turns out to have been the collection of personal artifacts, culled from a greater archive, that David brings to her. This self-consciousness buried in the novel’s form never distracts from its somber attention to human detail; if anything, it is a conceit that intensifies our emotion.

Meeting his mother so late in life, David has a chance to tell his life story in one stroke. “It was all he’d ever wanted, someone to tell these things to.” The inveterate collector turns out to be, like the patrons of his museum, an inspired narcissist.

blytal@nysun.com