Daniel Mason is the kind of writer who believes that vagueness equates with poeticism. He never names the country that is the setting of his second novel, and his title — “A Far Country” (Knopf, 288 pages, $24) — suggests that he wants it to represent any small, poor, troubled nation. For a while, I played a guessing game, but he seems to have scrambled the details of several tropical, sugarcane-growing countries, to make it impossible to pin down.

What does Mr. Mason want to do by resisting specificity? He tells a story that is partly about poverty but also contains more universal messages about love and the consequences of idealizing someone. When Mr. Mason focuses specifically on the world of the poor, his descriptions are keen — the account of the heroine, Isabel, who works as a flag-waver for an incumbent’s political campaign is both funny and disheartening. But Mr. Mason is less successful in constructing and resolving the psychological plot.

“A Far Country” begins with a several-page description of the periodic droughts that ravage the country’s interior, where Isabel’s family are cane cutters. These passages ought to be moving, but they are mostly pretentious. Mr. Mason starts sentence after sentence with the third-person plural, like an incantation, and begins three paragraphs with variations on “They watched the sky and …” When he finally introduces his protagonist, it comes as a relief.

Isabel hardly speaks in the novel. She has many practical skills — caring for babies and farming — and she has a sixth sense, particularly for her beloved older brother, Isaias: She can locate him easily in a huge field of cane. But when Isaias decides he is sick of cutting cane and runs away to test his fortune as a musician in the city in the south (never named, of course), her safety net is yanked away.

Between the oncoming drought and the rich thugs who arrive and lay title to the land, Isabel and her parents begin to starve. Her parents send her to join her brother and a cousin, Manuela, in the city. Manuela works as a maid and pays someone to care for her baby during the week — Isabel moves in with her and takes over the childcare.

On her grueling, several-day journey on the back of a flatbed truck, packed in with the other migrants, the thought of seeing Isaias sustains Isabel, although the family hasn’t heard from him for months. But he doesn’t meet her at the bus station, and when she finds her way to Manuela’s house — which is located in a miserable shantytown called, ironically, New Eden — he isn’t there.

The rest of the book describes the months of Isabel’s waiting for her brother, while very slowly she begins to grow up. She carries Manuela’s baby in a sling into the city, where she searches for Isaias as she did in the cane fields. In a painful scene, she follows a note he left in one of his pockets to a fancy apartment building in the city, where he must have applied for a job. She manages to get in to see the woman named in the note, who Mr. Mason describes beautifully, sitting against a glass door to the patio, in her white, low-cut dress, with a tan and a cigarette, and this wonderful detail: “On the table beside her was a plate of wet grapes.” We can’t help but consider how expensive those grapes must be, and the person who has just washed them.

Isabel says she is looking for her brother. The woman dismisses her, but Isabel stands her ground. Even after the woman tells her to get out, and picks up the phone as though to call the police, Isabel continues to sit. She imagines overturning the table, breaking the woman’s arm, smashing the phone into her face. “She knew, with certainty, that hurting the woman was the solution to everything that had happened to her since she left the north. The logic was impeccable, crystal.” She gets up and leaves, but we see that she is much stronger than when she arrived in the city.

She also begins a tentative romance, transferring her attachment as she starts to accept her brother’s absence. Then, very fast, the story is tied up, and all the psychological meaning laid out in a quick page as Isabel, in a rush, intuits the reason Isaias disappeared — because he could not confront her ideal with the shabby reality of what he has become. Mr. Mason has reduced the long period of Isabel’s waiting to this simple moral.

If Mr. Mason had chosen to place his characters in a real country, rather than a symbolic one, and to pursue the theme of Isabel’s gradual empowerment, rather than falling back on stark psychology, his novel would not feel so limited. He could have titled it “Isabel in Trinidad,” or wherever he decided to set it.