The things that give a masculine romance its personality — the women, the adventurous localities, the overall competence in description — all boil down to boasting. Without a tang of authorial intimidation and the tug of a good narrative, a would-be Hemingway will read like a slightly corrupt nature writer or an immoral chef. Michael Ondaatje is a high step above that. But his new novel, the strikingly odd “Divisadero” (Knopf, 288 pages, $24), puts him on weak footing. With an inventive structure that ought to set him apart, he sets himself adrift, trailing a flotsam of romantic scenarios.

The novel’s first episode introduces a complex that will be repeated, like a strong archetype, throughout. On a farm in Northern California, a father who drinks red wine for breakfast has raised a daughter, Anna, and an adoptee, Claire, as virtual twins. Also present is Coop, a farmhand only a few years older than the girls, who eventually seduces Anna. When the father finds out, he beats Coop with a three-legged stool, knocking him through a window, almost killing him. Then Anna stabs him with a piece of the shattered window and he takes her away, leaving Claire to nurse Coop. Coop leaves. Anna escapes her father and becomes a pseudonymous writer. Coop becomes a gambler. The mad whirl of situations — from the almost mythological farm to the climate-controlled casinos where the date is specifically 1991, and then to the south of France where Anna takes a Gypsy lover — finally comes to a stop when Mr. Ondaatje cracks his novel in two, and gives the second half entirely to the fictional writer, Lucien Segura, whom Anna had gone to France to study.

This is Mr. Ondaatje’s first novel since the 1970s that does not revolve around political violence. Though it has its jagged political edges, this book is, at its center, about mirrors. In the last line of the book, Mr. Ondaatje has Segura sinking in a boat, observing the lake as he goes down: “Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible.” These narcissistic birds mirror Anna’s regard for Claire. Anna, indeed, notes that

I find the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere (I draw portraits of them everywhere), as they perhaps still concern themselves with my absence, wherever they are.

Her careful construction, “concern themselves with my absence,” says something real about loneliness, but it comes second behind that “everywhere,” italicized as if for the wonder of it. The sparkling ambition of “Divisadero” is to refract its universal theme from as many faces as possible.

The person we miss is everywhere. The book’s title comes from a San Francisco street name, meaning both division and “to gaze at something from a distance.” Segura, as a boy, befriends a young bride, Marie-Neige, who is farouche like Claire and whose husband is violent like Anna’s father. Segura grows up and leaves and befriends a young Gypsy boy, Rafael, who rode a runaway horse like Claire, and who, like Coop, can recognize the sound of the wind rustling a given tree, and who plays guitar with a great sense of privacy like that of Anna, the writer, and that of Segura, the other writer, who works at a blue table like the one Anna was painting for Coop the day her father attacked and who puts Marie-Neige in all of his stories, as Anna puts Claire in hers.

One could go on like this, tracing the story as it loops itself into the same knot, again and again. Variations on the word “intricate” are used at least three times.

Mr. Ondaatje is not a writer to hide himself. He indulges in provocative adjectives — a clockmaker “will insist on his taut espresso” — and makes allusions that seem unnecessary, referring to the “tender buttons” of a real, old-fashioned dress. Here is Rafael, showily — and beautifully — imagining life as a bird: “What you experience in the high air is the petite life on earth, a drifting of voices, the creak of a wagon, the retort and smoke from a gun among the almond trees.”

Showmanship crams this book with romantic, masculine adventure: a leaky water tower that has to be plugged from the inside, an abandoned military base inhabited by a reclusive cardsharp, a screwtop steeple repaired by brawling workers, a cottage that needs repair, and a glass splinter stuck in an eyeball. Mr. Ondaatje’s imagination is palpably great, and “Divisadero,” with its impossible orphaned women and its heterogeneous locales, would make any narrative puzzle meaningful.

But Mr. Ondaatje has not created a puzzle. He has created a pattern. It invites noticing but produces no rewarding surprise or conclusion. Instead, we are left to trace authorial intention, everywhere.

blytal@nysun.com