The publication date is a misfire, but it’s understandable. Common sense would dictate that a new novel from one of America’s most esteemed playwrights, whose best-known work is resolutely masculine, ought to come out just ahead of Father’s Day, alongside the titles on war and golf and the underworld.

But David Rabe’s “Dinosaurs on the Roof” (Simon & Schuster, 484 pages, $26) is, it turns out, a month overdue. A story of mothers and daughters and the Rapture, it is a Father’s Day book only if the father in question is the eternal one. Startlingly, Mr. Rabe — who clearly has spent some years listening intently to the women in his life — has written a novel that belongs in the Mother’s Day lineup.

One autumn afternoon in 1997 in little Belger, Iowa, Bernice Doorley shows up unannounced outside the home of her late best friend’s daughter, Janet. Seventy and widowed, estranged from her only child, still missing Janet’s mom, Bernice has a peculiar request: Would Janet mind coming by to feed her three dogs and two cats in the morning, since she’s due to be whisked up to heaven that night?

“This is a matter of Jesus and a bunch of special angels coming to haul some people off body and soul, all the folks who been saved,” Bernice explains. “And this one load is coming out of Belger, and I am one of them going to be taken up.”

Janet, as Bernice well knows, and as any number of people in their suffocatingly busybody-filled town would be happy to confirm, is a poor choice at present for any task demanding dependability. Having divorced the husband she sort of loved and abandoned the teaching career that was her passion, she is a lost soul, spiraling humiliatingly into alcoholism and drug abuse, with no parents left to stop her fall. Friendless by design, she has cut all ties with nearly everyone in her life except her drug dealer. Even her married lover, threatening to come too close to her heart, must be gotten rid of.

Bernice’s appearance is an intrusion, her request an imposition. But she remembers the animal-loving girl Janet was 30 years before, and Janet — though she’s sure Bernice is deranged — somehow signs on.

Bernice isn’t deranged, but she is lonely. Belief in the Rapture was not on her radar until six months ago, when she became a born-again Christian at a church that set up in a converted barn outside town. Her friend Hazel had taken her, and Bernice wouldn’t have been spending so much time with bossy, annoying Hazel if Janet’s mom hadn’t died. But now their pastor says he’s gotten messages from God, and the angels are coming for them.

This would seem to be good news for someone whose favorite people are all dead. What catches Bernice unawares is the murkiness of her feelings about being raptured away in a storm of angels, and not just because it’s a struggle to reconcile dreams of glory with the Midwestern humility ingrained in her.

“Were they all in heaven waiting, and would they give her a nice welcome?” she wonders. “Even though she’d be arriving in this funny way, looking maybe uppity and full of herself sailing into heaven in her regular body like a saint.”

It’s also because, even though she hungers for decent human companionship, and her broken-down body is an ever-present source of inconvenience and mortification, there are things about her life that she will miss. The thought of leaving her animals, especially her elderly, ailing mongrel, General, pains her. Making things right with her daughter, Irma, before she goes would put her at ease. But the clock is ticking.

The bulk of the novel takes place over one 24-hour period, and when the Rapture fails to occur as expected, it is rescheduled for later in the day. This buys Bernice some time, and impinges somewhat on the vast swaths of time through which Janet stumbles and swerves.

Janet is at least as badly in need of spiritual solace as Bernice is, but she seeks it in Jack Daniel’s, in marijuana and quaaludes, in sex that may or may not mean as little or as much as she needs it to mean. When her dealer sends her off with a free sample of a life-destroying new drug, she doesn’t touch it at first. But it feels as inevitable as a gun in a Chekhov drama: If it’s there, someone will use it before the end.

“Dinosaurs on the Roof” shifts with great dexterity from comedy to pathos, from despair to poignant recollection; it is imbued with an off-kilter lunacy familiar from Mr. Rabe’s plays.

Best known for works such as “Hurlyburly” and “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” Mr. Rabe grew up in Iowa and proves himself here as perfectly attuned to its patterns of speech as if he’d never left. He has fun with it, too. Vicki Lawrence (in Mama mode) and Carol Burnett would feel right at home with some of the dialogue between Bernice and Hazel, who, en route to glory, can’t get through five minutes without bickering with each other.

But Mr. Rabe’s point is not to ridicule the hayseeds, at least not any more than he’d ridicule anyone else for being human. On the contrary, kindness and warmth suffuse the way he regards and inhabits his characters. Their fears, their failings, their myriad bodily weaknesses — hunger, thirst, lust, addiction, incontinence, fatigue — earn his compassion. Charmingly, he is perhaps most sympathetic to Bernice’s sweet, silly trio of dogs, who are among the novel’s most vividly drawn characters. (It is no surprise, then, that Mr. Rabe’s author photo is a lovely picture of the dog he’s posing with but not such a flattering shot of him.)

The animals, Mr. Rabe suggests, are some of the most vulnerable among us, the most in need of nurturing and protection. Likewise the children, who carry their wounds straight into adulthood if they aren’t salved in time. Rather than fly off to heaven and leave those tasks undone, it might be better to stick around.