In her debut novel, “Tuesday Nights in 1980,” Molly Prentiss sets an almost impertinently high bar for herself. She’s determined to write a love letter in polychrome to a bygone Manhattan; to recreate the squalid exuberance of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s and Keith Haring’s art scene; to explore all the important, hairy themes — love, creativity, losing your innocence in one cruel swoop.

That she mostly pulls it off is impressive, thrilling. That she sometimes sorely tests the elasticity of your patience with her excesses is also part of the deal. Give her a mulligan on them. She knows exactly where she wants her book to go.

After a brief prologue, “Tuesday Nights in 1980” starts at a New Year’s Eve party on Dec. 31, 1979, in the home of Winona George, a larger-than-life New York gallerist who says things like, “You’ve got the I-was-born-with-its and the self-taughts and something-somethings” to the artists she loves. It’s a moment when the art scene is changing — “there was a new air of possibility and a new wave of capital coming in” — and the guest list reflects it. The California conceptual artist John Baldessari is there, shivering from the New York cold. So is Keith Haring.

But most important, so are two of the novel’s three main characters: Raul Engales, a handsome young painter who has fled Argentina’s “Dirty War”; and James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic with overlarge ears and undersized social confidence who is nevertheless the toast of downtown, thanks to his impeccable taste. Later that night, Engales will leave the party and meet Lucy — a radiant gal from Ketchum, Idaho, who’s come to New York because she “didn’t want to have only one story” (who does?) — and fall giddily in love.