What would you do if your husband, the father of your children, carried on a months-long affair with a younger woman? What would you do if the woman wrote to you, sending you a box full of explicit texts and chat transcripts detailing the things her husband had wanted to do to her?

What would you do if your children found the box and read everything?

In Julia Pierpont’s poignant debut novel, every choice made after this moment further fractures a broken family’s future into seemingly infinite possible paths. The husband, Jack, has promised his wife, Deb, he’d end a fling with a much younger girl. The arrival of the box, and its discovery by confused Kay, 11, and furious Simon, 15, blows up the couple’s tenuous truce and sets the family spinning. In the crucial weeks that follow, the family’s fate hangs in the balance; even the smallest decisions have the potential to define the outcome.

Pierpont dives into the mind of each family member over the course of the book, managing to portray a 11-year-old girl’s internal confusion with the same sure-footedness as her father’s self-centered braggadocio. In the aftermath of the box’s arrival, Deb decides to take the children to their ramshackle summer house for a few weeks to regroup. Kay and Simon, outraged at their father and yet also resentful toward their mother, who somehow allowed this affair to happen, turn inward.

Kay, a quiet kid whose hobby is writing ‘Seinfeld’ fan fiction, is engulfed in things she doesn’t understand: her own feelings about her father, the shifting sands of her parents’ marriage, and the lurid phrases she read in the box of messages intended for her mother. Simon, a self-conscious teen who longs for the lack of self-consciousness of his cooler peers, intensifies his adolescent quest for a girlfriend, or at least a few makeouts. Both kids resist even speaking to their father, who once easily won their favor in the way fun dads do. A successful artist, Jack wallows after a failed exhibition, additionally tormented by his children’s united front against him.

With the central tie of Deb and Jack’s marriage fraying, things seem in danger of completely falling apart. But in Pierpont’s world, nothing simply falls apart; even the smallest decision — to take some time away at the summer house, for example — can tip the balance from reconciliation to divorce.

Though comparisons to Virginia Woolf will necessarily place most contemporary novels in the shadow of her genius, Among the Ten Thousand Things carries through the late author’s spirit, if not her revolutionary style. A modern successor to To the Lighthouse, the novel considers divorce rather than parental death, and the psychological toll on each member of the family. In an interlude, “That Year and Those That Followed,” Pierpont fast-forwards through the years, foretelling the unpredictable effects of this crucial family event, laid out in evocative yet sparing detail. It’s impossible not to think of “Time Passes,” the pivotal interlude in To the Lighthouse, an iconic rendition of the cumulative effects of time.

Her prose does lack the subtle rhythms and layers of meaning of writers like Woolf; her style exemplifies the straightforward clarity of today’s MFA-schooled writers. Fans of Woolf’s insight into the human consciousness, however, will savor Pierpont’s acute observation of a family in crisis, her deft pacing and deeply human characterization of each member of the family. Among the Ten Thousand Things speaks to what makes a person, and a family, tick, even when it can so easily seem utterly inexplicable.

The Bottom Line:
Among the Ten Thousand Things brings a family and its members to life in a deeply perceptive, compelling narrative whose emotional power gives weight to the unvarnished prose.

What other reviewers think:
Kirkus: “It’s loneliness that’s at the novel’s core, hitting unsentimentally and with blunt, nauseating force.”

Publishers Weekly: “The perennial theme of marital infidelity is given a brisk, insightful, and sophisticated turn in Pierpont’s impressive debut.”

Who wrote it?
Julia Pierpont graduated from the NYU Creative Writing Program. Among the Ten Thousand Things is her debut novel.

Who will read it?
Readers who enjoy domestic dramas with literary style.

Opening lines:
“Dear Deborah,
Do you go by Deborah? It sounds so uptight. I bet you hate Debbie. I hate Debbie, too.
Jack calls you Deb.
This is a letter about Jack.
I began sleeping with your husband last June. We were together for seven months, almost as long as I’ve known him.”

Notable passage:
“Fathers have a way with daughters that mothers never do. Deb had never known Kay to stay mad at Jack, or to deny him anything. And Deb couldn’t hold it against her; things had been the same way with her own dad. If her mother dressed Deb’s wounds, her father was the one who kissed them to make them better. It was Ruth who’d scratched the satin from Deb’s first pair of pointe shoes, who’d singed the ribbons to keep them from fraying and knelt with her daughter on the driveway, pounding the toe boxes against the asphalt while Norman sat in the living room with his tray dinner and TV. ‘Who won?’ he’d say when they came in after.”

Among the Ten Thousand Things
by Julia Pierpont
Random House, $26.00
Publishes July 7, 2015

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