HOW TO BUILD A BOAT, by Elaine Feeney

The Irish writer Elaine Feeney’s atmospheric second novel, “How to Build a Boat,” is set in the small fictional town of Emory, home to 13-year-old Jamie O’Neill and his father, Eoin. Perched on the west coast of Ireland, the town is defined by the River Brú, “an infinite and uninhabitable space” that flows into the Atlantic and holds the characters together in a desperate, watery grasp.

The novel opens with an autumnal father-and-son walk along this crucial river. “It bursts sometimes, did you know that?” Jamie asks Eoin. “My teacher said when that happens it makes a mess. And did you know that Brú means crushing?”

The boy’s speech spills forth in bursts of information and feelings, reminiscent of an early Nicholson Baker novel or Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport.” It’s a style Feeney utilized to great effect in her first novel, “As You Were,” though here, the stream-of-consciousness narration is not restricted to Jamie’s internal world. In this way, we learn that the boy loves tall trees and Edgar Allan Poe; that his teenage mother, Noelle, died giving birth to him; and that his father is protective of his bright, neurodiverse son and loves him unconditionally.

Feeney effortlessly combines the overwhelming ebb and flow of life with her boat-building plot. Jamie’s mother was a swimming champion, and every day he watches a video of her competing in a school meet, “like a red admiral in the summer sky.” He dreams of creating a perpetual motion machine, which he believes can reunite him with his mother. “I want her in my head, and I like watching her,” Jamie explains. “It makes everything slow down, and if a machine runs at the same time she’s onscreen I am hoping they energize each other.”

Eoin is frustrated by his son’s obsession; he sees in Jamie’s efforts an unwanted reminder of Noelle’s death. But Jamie has just started a new school, and two of his teachers, Tess Mahon and Tadhg Foley, embrace the spirit of his quest. Together they begin a boat-building project. For Jamie, the boat is a provisional substitute for his fantasy of a perpetual motion machine. For Tess and Tadhg, who see that Jamie is isolated from his classmates, it is a collective activity through which they can improve Jamie’s socialization. The exhaustively researched building of the boat continues through the long winter as Feeney charts the developing relationships between Jamie and his peers, and the turbulent connection between Tess and Tadhg.

Feeney’s prose is both careful and relaxed — detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling, the point of view shifting throughout scenes.

In some places, the novel stumbles. Plotlines of bullying, inappropriate adult attention and misogyny are underexplored. Tess, Tadhg and Jamie have all suffered the loss of a parent as children, but their shared tragedy is only briefly touched upon; it is left for the reader to decide whether it is coincidental or significant.

Yet the difficult winter carries the reader into a hopeful spring. Life is random; our connections are as essential and uncontrollable as the tides, the book seems to say. All we can do is learn how to float.

Sophie Ward is an actor and the author of the novels “Love and Other Thought Experiments” and “The Schoolhouse.”

HOW TO BUILD A BOAT | By Elaine Feeney | 298 pp. | Biblioasis | Paperback | $24.95