Claire Messud combines truth and fiction in the story of her French Algerian family

Claire Messud's latest novel, “This Strange Eventful Story,” has a compelling story of its own. It is based on the dramas and adventures of his own French, Algerian and Canadian family. And it is based on handwritten memoirs, of more than 1,000 pages, by her paternal grandfather; although we cannot be sure with what liberality or precision.

Messud notes, in a disclaimer, that “all characters, events and incidents have been fictitious.” The resulting amalgam (of truth and invention, of the epic and the intimate) is lyrically written and almost immediately absorbing. As we get to know their characters, we are surprised by their emotional impact, especially because of their ambiguous relationship with reality.

Messud's multigenerational story about the Cassars, a family displaced from French colonial Algeria, is told from divergent perspectives, primarily in the third person. The only first-person narration is from a granddaughter, Chloe, Messud's alleged stand-in.

“I'm a writer; I tell stories,” Chloe says in the prologue. “Of course, I really want to save lives,” she adds, although she has been taught to believe, in WH Auden's oft-quoted formulation, “that poetry makes nothing happen.” His first challenge, he suggests, is where to begin, especially since every beginning is also a middle ground, every perspective is always partial, and “the past swirls together and within the present.”

The Cassars are prey to the tumultuous history of the 20th century, with its competing nationalisms, wars of colonialism and aggression, and an increasingly global world order. These forces stimulate the family's dizzying sequence of migrations, separations and resettlements, propelling its members, in various combinations, from Algeria and Lebanon to France, Greece, the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Argentina and Australia.

By heritage, the Cassars are French Algerian settlers, or pieds-noirs— It was not fully accepted by either the native Algerians or the French. One of the themes of the novel is a perennial longing for home and a sense of belonging. The Cassars' frequent alienation from their environment, their self-definition as outsiders, intensifies their family ties, even if those ties sometimes chafe or fail to unite. “You shouldn't worry too much about a place, just as you shouldn't worry too much about people outside your family,” says François, Chloe's father.

The family's nomadic history, as described here, stretches from 1940 to 2010, with an epilogue dating back to 1927. Famous names—Gloria Steinem, Jorge Luis Borges, and philosophers Jacques Derrida and Raymond Aron—appear in cameos. Against the backdrop of world-historical upheavals, Messud tells a bittersweet story of passionate love, thwarted ambitions, emotional dysfunction, and ultimately, survival.

When World War II begins, Gaston Cassar, Chloe's grandfather, is a naval officer stranded in Thessaloniki, Greece, without his family. His wife, Lucienne, 13 years older than him, returned to Algeria with her two children. The couple's seemingly mythical love, which survives this separation and more, is akin to the legendary green light in “The Great Gatsby,” tantalizing and deceptive at the same time.

Gaston and Lucienne's son, François, always waits for his father's approval. A talented student, he wins a Fulbright scholarship and enrolls at Amherst College to start over in America. The next step is graduate studies at Harvard, “the very meaning of triumph.” During a summer at Oxford, he meets Barbara Fisk, the Toronto native who will become his wife.

Despite his mother's misgivings, the match begins promisingly. But the couple's passion fades and separations distance them. François, at Barbara's urging, betrays his academic gifts to pursue a more lucrative business career (just as his father abandoned his literary ambitions). Losing himself, he sacrifices the adoration and respect of his wife and turns to the bottle. Barbara, an aspiring lawyer, also struggles and finds herself “like Gulliver… pinned down by so many little threads, the lines of love and obligation that have always made up an adult life.”

Meanwhile, François's younger sister, Denise, never leaves the house. Denying her lesbian desires and battling depression, she spends much of her life romantically obsessed with her married boss, mistaking her kindness for something else.

It is Chloe, daughter of François and Barbara, who must make sense of this tangled inheritance, “this strange story full of events.” That she becomes a writer, accomplishing what her father and her grandfather could not, seems destined, a kind of fulfillment.

Messud, a professor of fiction at Harvard and the author of novels such as “The Woman Upstairs” and “The Emperor's Children,” is a skilled prose stylist. One of her characteristic moves is her reliance on long, fluid, perfectly composed sentences, full of parallel constructions, perhaps an analogy with the flow of history. She writes, for example, of Gaston's “beloved Algeria, lost forever but etched in him, not only the sprawling white city he cherished so much, arranged on the hillside around the blue bay, but also the interior, the soft fields of cultivation, the rolling hillsides, the rocky gorges, Constantine like a fairy-tale city perched on its thorny crest, buffeted by the winds, the glory of the wide desert…”

With its changing voices, chronology, and locations, this is a challenging novel, especially for those unfamiliar with Algerian history. Sometimes, when characters review events and feelings, repetition arises. The allusions to Gaston and Lucienne's irrevocable love, however determined, grow tiresome, until their meaning changes in the book's powerful final twist.

These are objections. Messud writes beautifully about the toll of dementia and decrepitude, and how life's challenges can suddenly widen or bridge emotional divides. It's impossible not to feel sorry for François, in particular, as he attempts to forge a meaningful and loving existence. Apparently, it is very easy even for the well-intentioned to make a mistake.

As he navigates his own complex and confusing legacy, Messud's generosity of spirit prevails. “Sometimes we feel alone,” says her alter ego, 7-year-old Chloe, wise beyond her years, “but we are always more connected than we think.”

Julia M. Klein is a reporter and cultural critic in Philadelphia.