Alice McDermott tends to work on the same canvas, going back again and again to explore one particular place, time, and people, applying her literary brushstrokes with ever more precision and affection. Those who have read her novels, including “That Night,” “At Weddings and Wakes,” and “Charming Billy,” will recall instantly that she writes about Irish Catholics living on Long Island in the mid-20th century. With “After This” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $24), she focuses tightly on the central island — on the suburban streets, postwar years, and one family’s interactions, capturing them all with extraordinary poignancy.

“After This” follows the Keanes from the late 1940s, when spinsterish Mary meets veteran John by chance at a Shrafft’s lunch counter in Manhattan, through the wedding of the couple’s youngest child some 30 years later. It’s not a particularly happy tale, but it is made luminous by the hopes and efforts of the Keanes to care for each other, and by the author’s belief that yearning after love ultimately defeats suffering and alienation. While Ms. McDermott stands at some distance from this tribe and the times they live through, the fact that she has sprung from the same milieu gives the story a knowing intimacy, and the author skillfully taps into the undercurrents of superstition and fatalism that color Irish-American life. “After This” is ultimately an affirmation of this culture, and an acknowledgment of what endures out of it.

Mary and John marry and have four children. Ms. McDermott looks closely at each of these offspring in turn, disclosing the events that shape their decisions and adult destinies during years of social change — the legalization of abortion, greater opportunities for women, loosening of sexual mores, and the Vietnam War. The novel is made up of relatively few carefully constructed scenes, chapters that read like stand-alone short stories. Holding it together is the relationship between John Keane and his daughter, Clare. The two are opposites. John, an introvert and a loner, fought in the Ardennes in World War II and is left with a leg injury, harsh memories, and deep unease. Clare, the baby of the family, is shown sailing forth into life blessed with hope and optimism, the least burdened member of the clan. Clare’s siblings — two older brothers and a sister — suffer more as a consequence of the cultural dislocations of the 1960s. But she, younger, is spared. The connection between the damaged father and his blithe daughter is only one strand in a tightly woven story, but it illustrates most clearly the author’s intent, for Clare answers John’s fears with a resounding, life-affirming act of will.

Ms. McDermott loves to approach important happenings obliquely, to capture how so many momentous events in life are stumbled upon, embedded in ordinary days. She takes single details — an accidental fall, skin that resembles marble, a flashlight by the side of the bed — and makes them reverberate throughout the plot. She enjoys pointing the reader in one direction and then, at the last moment, turning to arrive at a different, more apt, destination. She will occasionally leap ahead two decades and disclose the ultimate fate of a character before returning to the action, but manages to do so without disturbing the flow of the story. This lends a studied quality to Ms. McDermott’s style, and one senses a loathing for the predictable that compels her to take the roundabout way even when a straighter narrative path would have sufficed.

For those of us who grew up in Ms. McDermott’s world or in precincts like it, the exactness of her descriptions can be thrilling. Car interiors, 1970s speech, the confessionals of those odd, in-the-round Catholic churches built in the 1960s — she nails them all. And readers of every background will take away from “After This” something transcendent — the author’s recognition of the divinity in each life. In the final chapter, a priest listens to a young musician performing and hears his genius:

There were the ordinary pianists who played, no doubt, as they had been taught to play … and then there was a kid like this who played in a trance … not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there … and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to bring it briefly, briefly, to his untrained ear.

With her own unfailing ear for what people take away from their pasts and her careful, Pointillistic approach to telling a story, Ms. McDermott could be describing herself in this passage. She sees patterns and themes that others overlook. She covers enormous ground yet never wastes a word, and brings to life a family representative of so many families in our not so distant past. It is the mark of a great novelist to make the particular universal, and it is McDermott’s gift to appreciate and evoke the Nassau County of, seemingly, just the other day. An unlikely literary landscape, perhaps, but it has proven a most fertile field for her boundless imagination — and never more so than in “After This.”

Ms. McHugh is an editor and writer living in New York. She last wrote for these pages about Marisha Pessl.