By Siri Hustvedt. Henry Holt, 306 pp, $28, hardcover

How do you spell worry? If you’re Eglantine “Eggy” Casaubon, it’s “W R E” on green construction paper. But don’t worry: The Sorrows of an American is no kiddie tale. Eggy is the only kindergartner among an unusual collection of adult worriers in Siri Hustvedt’s sweepingly grand yet seductively intimate new novel. And not just one American but all of these New Yorkers and Minnesotans have sorrows—as well as posttraumatic stress, loneliness, unrequited lust, weird dreams, and an obsessive stalker or two.

“Trauma isn’t part of a story. It is what we refuse to make part of our story,” Erik Davidsen tells us with great authority, and not just because he’s six foot five. In Hustvedt’s last novel, What I Loved, the author demonstrated a canny way with her male art-historian narrator, Leo Hertzberg. With Dr. Erik, this story’s resident psychotherapist-narrator, not only do we access his keenly intellectual noggin, but it’s his job to analyze everyone else’s. No psych degree is needed to realize that this divorced, depressed Manhattan shrink could use some couch time himself.

What seems to be the trouble, exactly? Erik and his writer-sister Inga find a letter, hinting at a terrible deed, among their deceased father’s papers back in their small Minnesota hometown. In New York City, Inga wrangles a journalist digging dirt on her dead celebrity-writer husband. She’s also wrestling with a new writer-lover obsessed with said dead spouse, and a dangerously alluring actor with incriminating letters of her own. Inga’s teen daughter Sonia still can’t speak of the people she witnessed jumping from the towers on 9/11. And Erik? His war-traumatized father haunts his dreams. And he’s sufficiently smitten by his basement tenant—Jamaican artist Miranda, mother of Eggy—to get mired in her creepy stalker problem.

Hustvedt, clearly fascinated by all these minds, uses humbly astute Erik to click seemingly disparate characters together into one endearingly human, emotional landscape. For all, “memories of war, rape, near-fatal accidents, and collapsing buildings aren’t like other memories. They are kept separate in the mind.” Hustvedt’s smarty-pants characters turn to science, philosophy, psychotherapy, and art, hoping to elucidate their sorrows. But when Erik regards his lanky, lonely self—wondering “Was this body anything for Miranda? For good measure, I changed my socks”—the elegant prose brims with humour and a sweet empathy.