"What can you say about the death of a child?" Gin Rathbone, the aging narrator of Port Mungo, muses on the opening page of this mesmerizing novel as she reflects on her niece's baffling fate.

What follows is not so much an answer as a careful framing of the secrets and silences that plague her brother, the painter Jack Rathbone, after the tragic and mysterious death of his daughter at the age of 16.

Sifting through the emotional wreckage of Jack and his family, Gin narrates her brother's life and his destructive relationship with Vera Savage, an artist with whom he runs away from London in the 1960s.

After spending a short time in New York City, Jack, 17 and aspiring to cultivate his own talent, convinces Vera, who is 30 and already an established artist, to travel south to escape the destructive temptations of living in the city.

They ultimately settle in tropical Port Mungo: "a once-prosperous river town now gone to seed, wilting and steaming among the mangrove swamps of the Gulf of Honduras." In this stifling environment, Jack hopes the two of them will paint productively together, side by side.

His idealistic vision is short-lived, for Vera quickly becomes disillusioned with him and their remote life and relies increasingly on alcohol and other men to entertain herself. In the midst of their marital disharmony, their first daughter, Peg, is born. Twelve years later, they have Anna, which only compounds their familial dysfunction.

When Anna is four, Peg's dead body is found submerged in the swamps, and the family soon disintegrates. Jack and Gin's elder brother, Gerard, swoops in from England to rescue Anna. Jack returns to New York City and relies on Gin for comfort and support, while Vera wanders off in a drunken stupor. The cause of Peg's death is unknown and speculations abound.

As the narrative moves between the past and the present, it becomes clear that the truthful account not only of what happened to Peg but also Jack's entire life remains stubbornly elusive, if not impossible to know.

Slowly realizing her own fallibility in assessing her brother's life, Gin observes, "I remember once thinking, with regard to Peg's death, that there are no mysteries, only secrets."

It is this unfolding awareness of the power of familial secrecy that makes this novel utterly gripping. Starting with the melodrama of these dysfunctional artists, McGrath deftly crafts it into a sophisticated psychological exploration of the darker sides of memory, secrecy, desire and guilt.

Yet the triumph is in the telling, for Gin's point of view and her relationship with her brother provides the gut-churning tension necessary for this novel to work its sinister charm.

Lacing Gin's affection for Jack with incestuous overtones, McGrath lends an obsessive quality to her emotional attachment to him, which prevents her from ever realizing her own independence from her brother. Even when not physically in her life, his presence looms over her.

"With my brother occupying such a large, central role in my life," she confesses, "it was hard, as you might imagine, for anybody else to measure up." As Gin's love for and blind trust of her brother becomes evident, it is clear that no one in this novel can be trusted. Everyone has his or her bias.

Into this mess of self-interest steps Anna, when she unexpectedly appears in New York City in a seeming gesture of reconciliation. Hoping to know the truth about her family's past, she begins to work closely with her father.

Anna's reappearance unsettles Gin, who broods protectively over Jack. "And then I saw what was in store for us," she says.

"Anna Rathbone, by coming into our life like this, and rousing the past, was rousing her sister; and Peg, once roused, invariably laid waste to that most fragile of organs, I mean her father's heart."

Not surprisingly, this rousing does, in fact, wreak havoc on Gin and Jack's now-quiet lives. Anna's search for the truth not only unleashes additional stories and counter truths, but it also forces the family to confront the past that it long hoped to forget.

What is perhaps most painful and pleasing about this novel is that McGrath never fully reveals the truth, and as the novel lurches to its disturbing climax, it is all the more powerful for the mystery it preserves.

As Gin thinks when she finally listens to Vera's version of the story of Peg's death, we all harbor "stories we tell ourselves to go on living and not go mad."

However false such stories may be, McGrath reveals their haunting power to shape and control the lives of his characters.

And I would be lying if I didn't admit that there is a certain thrill in watching them teeter on the brink of madness and dejection as they construct and disguise their own fictions in their attempt to survive the horrors of their past. If such thrills appeal to you, then by all means, brace yourself for an enthralling read.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches literature at the University of Colorado and is the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military.

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