The Brambles. Eliza Minot. Knopf. $23.95. 244 pp.

Eliza Minot's second novel, The Brambles, builds on a secret -- information kept from three children by their parents. We all know the information is hidden somewhere, but Minot keeps her secret for a good two-thirds of the book.

You can guess the effect because you were once a child and secrets were kept from you. There's a sense of precariousness, a feeling that you do not have all the information you need to decide if the world of Minot's novel is safe or dangerous.

Florence, the matriarch, a retired model and dancer, is dead when the narrative begins. She has been killed in a plane crash at 62, leaving a husband, Arthur, 11 years her senior, and three children: Edie, 27, Margaret, 31 and Max, 29.

The dead mother, of course, is a staple not just in Minot's fiction (her first novel, The Tiny One, revolved around such a figure); her older sister Susan introduced the archetype in her 1986 debut, Monkeys, and her brother George adopted it for The Blue Bowl.

Still, to read these novels as merely autobiographical -- the Minots' mother died, prematurely, in 1977 -- is reductive. Rather, what Minot and her siblings share is a sense of the way family binds us, for good or ill. Margaret is the furthest along in life: a mother, with three children and a solid marriage. Edie, by contrast, is bulimic, unable to sustain either a relationship or a job. Max is somewhere in the middle; when we first meet him, he is sitting on the park bench where he has spent every day for the last few weeks, unable to tell his wife, Chloe, and their young son, Rex, that he is out of work.

It takes the first third of the novel for Minot to weave her characters together, primarily through dialogue. But Minot also entwines the family on a deeper level; that subterranean layer where relations awake, cinematically in the middle of the night, when a sibling has died or a child has been hit by an oncoming truck on a faraway freeway.

It's that elusive question of connection, although her task is a bit easier because with the Bramble family there is, quite simply, plenty of love to go around.

By mid-novel, when Margaret's husband, Brian, picks up his father-in-law, who has come to live out his days with his family, the reader feels that vast sense of warmth, a kind of off-gassing from strong, well-built and carefully nurtured relationships.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through The Brambles, the narrative kicks into second gear. Margaret gets rear-ended on her way to a doctor's appointment with the children and begins to see the ethereal woman who hit her hovering around her house.

It must be said -- though it is a little beside the point -- that the novel's ending, a sort of whiz-bang blowup, is less than believable, or maybe just jarringly pat after Minot has spent so much of the book revealing so deftly all the odds and ends and unfinished business that resemble most of our lives.

The Brambles are, above all, human, and not all of them are equally equipped to lead lives of quiet dignity. Some, like Edie, are needier than others; some, like Max, less emotionally available; and others, like Margaret, dear Margaret, live life as fully as possible while watching it, at the same time, from a very great distance.

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