“The Cliffs” by J. Courtney Sullivan; Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2024; 384 pages, hardcover, $29.

Jane Flanagan, the main character in J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel “The Cliffs,” made her way up from a pretty chaotic home. Her single mother devoted most of her life to booze and men, and toward the end of it, to trading in secondhand goods. Jane’s sister did not exactly follow in their mom’s footsteps, but pretty close.

By high school Jane wanted out of her life, and did what disaffected teenagers do all over North America: She found a hideout, in this case an overgrown, decaying mansion with a House of Usher feel to it, set back from sharp cliffs on the coast of southern Maine. With the guiding principle, “What Would My Mother Not Do?” Jane worked to become an honors student, got into Wesleyan University, took advanced degrees from Yale, and finally landed a fairly prestigious job as an archivist at the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

A couple of decades later when Jane makes a gloomy return to her hometown of Awadapquit, the old house is still there, but it’s been completely remade. But true to the early Poe-like atmosphere of the place, there seems to be a ghost.

The ghost is detected by Genevieve, the filthy rich and somewhat neurotic wife who is the driving force behind the acquisition of the dilapidated place and its makeover. On her return home from Massachusetts, Jane crosses paths with Genevieve, who discovers Jane is a professional researcher. Rich-woman style, she proceeds to bully Jane into researching the history of the house.

Circumstances being what they are — Jane has been placed on leave from her job and separated from her loving, too-good-to-be-true husband, David — Jane reluctantly takes the gig.

So questions about who the ghost is, what the history of the house is, and moreover, what is actually happening with Jane, all take shape as the main drivers of the story’s plot.

Jane has an old friend in town named Allison, who turns out, underneath her image as dynamic Mom-Community Member-Businesswoman, to be sort of devious. Jane and Allison think and say a lot of passive-aggressive things about Genevieve, among others, and they’re not always thinking kind thoughts about each other, either. At one crucial point Allison tricks Jane into visiting a psychic in an effort to figure out who Genevieve’s ghost might be.

The visit to a psychic fair on Mount Desert Island makes an interesting episode, and turns out to be the rising action in the gothic strand of the plot. For the latter part of the novel focuses mainly on Question 3: What is going on with Jane.

This is a book, as author Sullivan has elsewhere characterized her novels, about women for women. So eventually the predominant narrative thread becomes a detailed look inside Jane, her conflicted feelings about her dissolute mother, the details of her furloughs from her job and marriage, her relationship to liquor, and a subtler problem — namely, that Jane is from a chaotic lower-middle-class household, but trying to toe the lines of prim and proper, not to say sometimes holier-than-thou, upper-middle-class mores of Harvard-Radcliffe society. She does not seem to be up to it.

“The Cliffs” starts out with a gothic feel, then steadily shifts its footing to a fairly typical contemporary depiction of the main character’s chaotic emotional life. The plot moves along pretty well (with side trips into Native American history and a lengthy narrative in the 19th century), the characters are mainly well-drawn, and the narrative is seasoned with naturally used colloquialisms from well-to-do kitchen tables and college campuses. It’s a nice book.

J. Courtney Sullivan grew up in eastern Massachusetts, attended Smith College, and is the author of the novels “Maine,” “The Engagements,” “Friends and Strangers” and “Commencement,” among others. “The Cliffs” is available through online and local book sellers.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first Friday of each month. Contact Dana Wilde at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.