“Home making” is a phrase so fraught with political and social overtones that before opening this book I went to Google for a sterile definition: “The creation and management of a home, especially as a pleasant place in which to live.” This two-part framework is helpful. While Matalone’s “Home Making” is partially concerned with the aesthetics and processes of domestic labor, it’s that last part, that magic by which a woman — for this is nearly always women’s work, no? — transforms a physical structure into a place of comfort and safety, that is the subject of this heady and somber debut.

The architecture of the story is solid. A young freelancer named Chloe struggles to create and manage (so to speak!) a new home, acquired for her by her husband, from whom she is separated after her brief affair with another man. Apart from this, the novel features less of a plot than a collection of characters, all of whom bear their own secrets and hurts. There’s Chloe’s ob-gyn mother, Cybil; Beau, Chloe’s nurturing, bisexual best friend who assists her domestic efforts; her husband, Pat, who, having asked her to move out, suffers through his cancer in isolation: “From his private island, our home, he would watch the disease come closer and closer, sitting solo on the shore as the ship puttered into port.” Each character has a story to tell, though sometimes these are lost in Matalone’s superseding mission: to catalog all the ways in which a house can function as a metaphor.

At times, Chloe’s house is a refuge; at others, a burden. Those closest to her record their interpretations; most notably, Cybil, a biracial immigrant, teaches Chloe “that she, and by extension, me, did not belong to some Waspy vision of America. Our house could never be surrounded by a white picket fence. … That experience was not for us.” And then there are the quotes (Le Corbusier: “A house is a machine for living in”) that dot the novel like philosophical bric-a-brac. I was reminded of Heidi Julavits’s lament about the mechanical obligations of fiction: “When writing novels I cannot seem to escape the trap of a plot.” Though Matalone sometimes struggles to balance the theoretical with good storytelling, it’s nevertheless exciting to see her wrestle so artfully with her ideas.