Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s fiction might be described as psychological realism: without high modernist stream-of-consciousness or the stylization of typical realism, Schwartz presents a protagonist whose relationships, emotions, likes and dislikes, and patterns of thought and behavior are extraordinarily subtle and textured. The title of her third novel, Disturbances in the Field, is psychiatric jargon—the idea, drawing on physics, being that the source of many people’s psychological problems is that “something intrudes between the expressed need on the one hand and the response of the other”—but Schwartz herself, and her protagonist, Lydia, have no investment in dogma, psychoanalytic or otherwise.

The novel describes Lydia’s busy life on the Upper West Side of New York: she maintains close friendships with a group of women she knew in college at Barnard, who bonded over an intro philosophy course, and she’s married to a painter, Victor, with whom she has four children. The size and number of her social groups suit her well: as a professional musician and music teacher, she prefers to play in ensembles, enjoying trios and quintets in which “nothing individual is accomplished without the deferential support of the rest”—a statement that could also describe many families, happy and otherwise. With extraordinary precision and empathy, and in a narrative that gracefully swings between the past and the present, Schwartz describes the personalities of each of Lydia’s friends, lovers, and kids, down to the songs they sing and their thoughts about the ancient philosophers. When tragedy strikes Lydia’s family, and she begins, understandably enough, to falter, the responses of each of her loved ones reflect their personalities and positions relative to her, providing a rich sense of the fullness of Lydia’s experience.

Lydia is a modern Jewish woman, unselfconsciously; the family holds a Passover seder not out of obligation, but because they want to. In an almost proto-Seinfeld dilemma that sharply evokes what life can be like on the Upper West Side, Lydia struggles over whether to buy fruit from the new Korean grocery, or continue to patronize her current fruit man, a Holocaust survivor whose rudeness and paranoia bother her, but who addresses her, because she’s Jewish, as one of his “landsleute” (i.e., countrymen). Lydia’s thinking owes more to the Greek philosophers than to the Talmud, but even the psychological perspective she brings to her experiences could be said to be Jewish; it’s not coincidental that the title phrase itself is taught to her by a psychiatrist who is the son and grandson of rabbis. A heartbreaking novel that captures the small world of one woman in good times and bad, Disturbances in the Field is at once both intellectually stimulating and emotionally riveting, a quiet tour de force of family, love, and loss.