By Michelle Huneven. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp, $31, hardcover

The ninth step of Alcoholics Anonymous requires alcoholics to make amends to people they harmed during their plastered past. In Blame, Michelle Huneven’s riveting third novel, remorseful young history prof Patsy MacLemoore sums up her apologies for crimes committed while hammered like this: “Sorry I got your boyfriend/husband/kids drunk…Sorry I had sex with…Sorry I borrowed your camel coat and those Italian books and lost them. Sorry I smashed your garage door, sorry too about the crape myrtle. Sorry I fed you pills and alcohol and pierced your ears.”

We only glimpse this wild Patsy in that disturbing yet hilariously unglued ear-piercing episode. The next thing we and she know, she’s waking up in jail, a mother and child have been run over and killed in her Altadena, California, driveway, and she’s going to prison. Forget the wicked Patsy who lectured undergrads about her sex life. Huneven has written an utterly fascinating chronicle of Patsy-after-the-party—a tale of guilt and redemption that grabs you, shackles your attention, and throws away the key.

Doing hard time, Patsy learns to live with her sister inmates, from “wallet-filching prostitutes” to murderers and armed robbers. Released two years later, she gets a parole officer, attends AA meetings, and tries to “surface slowly”. But what she most wants is to figure out how to live. “Guilt,” Patsy tells a psychiatrist. “How to live with the guilt.”

That mission, spanning 20 years, makes for a transfixing story—without the reader needing any whisky shots to help it go down. The author, who writes with a clean elegance often bundled with dry wit, steers clear of icky moralizing while conveying a great kindness not only toward her unself-pitying antiheroine but also toward the numerous friends, lovers, mothers, brothers, ex-boozers, and ex-cons whose lives smash against one another and stick in unexpected ways. The realization that much of Patsy’s salvation comes from that connectedness between fragile human selves is simultaneously painful and comforting.

There’s a bit of a jaw-dropper deep in the story. It’s a clever one, knocking Patsy sideways: “And yet exultation gathered in her chest. What if? Something was already leaving, she almost glimpsed it, half birthed, a snarl of black feathers.” That the reader experiences a kind of catharsis along with her is also unexpected and oddly moving.