Put the words Vietnam War and Canada in a sentence together and, for Americans of a certain age—particularly men—you conjure specific memories of the early 1970s. I remember those days as quite carefree: wondering about my chances of a date and thankful I could pass for 18 in the local bar. Yet, is my memory reliable? Conversations decades later suggest perhaps not, that fledgling moral positions and a military father generated more conflict than I credit, that sincere apprehension over the world made everything not quite so happy-go-lucky.

In a sense, that is what The Sentimentalists is about.

In the first half of the story, the nameless narrator and her sister move their father, Napoleon Haskell, from his trailer home in North Dakota to Casablanca, Ontario, a town of government houses created after the original buildings were flooded out of existence by a works project. She teases out the history of the other characters: Napoleon, the well-meaning but unreliable father; the unnamed mother, subject to bouts of depression; Henry, a family friend and the father of Owen, one of Napoleon's friends who did not survive the war. My thought as I read was that Skibsrud was attempting an ambitious set of themes, making forays into the randomness of misfortune in our lives, the longing for life to be better and the necessary conviction that it will certainly happen, the appreciation for those perfect moments in time. With barely more than 100 pages left in the book, I was uncertain where it was headed and how it would be drawn together.

In the second half of the book, the Vietnam War takes center stage as Napoleon recounts his tour of duty, including the death of his friend, Owen. As his story progressed I began to feel unsettled. The events, though unfortunate, didn't seem adequate to explain his enduring depression, his alcoholism, his obsession with finding Henry. When Napoleon has finished his story and the narrator finds a transcript of a military trial, my feeling of disconnection only grew: the account made to the daughter and the one made during the war didn't jibe with each other. The latter hinted at darker and more complex events that had, somehow, been transformed in Napoleon's memory.

While reading the second part of the book, I realized that Skibsrud's focus wasn't on optimism that things would get better. It was on our conviction that things were once better—more generally, about the lack of sureness in our memory, the gloss that time can put on the past so much that even events become uncertain in our need to simplify and improve what lies behind us. The earlier pieces of the story took on new meaning, each character demonstrating a backward perspective that was, to use the author's simile, like looking through a telescope the wrong way and losing the details. The town's name, Casablanca, became more than a random choice. Now it could be seen as a reference to a cultural icon that time has transformed from a piece of mid-war boosterism into a symbol of a moment of moral clarity, a desirable destination from the moral ambiguity of Vietnam.

When confronted with the inaccuracy of recall, we are jolted. Hearing a poem she wrote when she was ten, the narrator wonders how she could have "imagined it all so simply; that Henry could have been for me, just, a man who fished. Who fixed the engines on boats. Who solved math problems with beatific patience in the evenings."

I found this a difficult book to read. Skibsrud's writing is deliberately fragmented at times, sometimes opaque, and full of asides into extended descriptions and philosophical musing. I had to read sentences more than once, sometimes aloud, to force my mind to parse what was being said. Her biographical notes show that she is a poet, venturing into novels for the first time, and there is some sense of it in this book. Coupling this with the late realization of where the earlier parts were headed, this seems like a book where a second reading would provide much more understanding and appreciation.