When you read Michael Ondaatje's new book, “Divisadero,” you must pay attention to symbols: shattered glass, Buddhist flags flying in the wind, tabula rasa, and the gyre of a church steeple. The book is also about fathers, but that link is told obliquely.

Ondaatje actually tells three stories in a tripartite frame. The modern family who lived in California is sundered through an act of violence. Resolution, if any, is only through a recounting of another man's life in southern France, and he tells a third story which commemorates a love lost through war.

At times Ondaatje is teasing the reader. He even has a character say, “Not knowing something essential makes you more involved.” There is a pattern to the first two stories, held together by taut sentences, such as “There is adventure in disguise.” All in “Divisadero” are in disguise sometime.

The book opens in the 1990s in Petaluma on a ranch high in the remnants of the Coast Range which separates the Pacific from the hot inner valleys. Two sisters share a house with their father who is unnamed, but they are not true sisters. Anna's mother died in childbirth, and in recompense the father brought home a second daughter, Claire, from the same hospital, born to a mother who had also died that day, and he raised them together.

They are joined by a third foundling, Coop, the lone survivor of his family. At 4 Coop hid under the floorboards to escape a berserker who destroyed the rest with a wooden board. At 20 he lived mostly in the grandfather's hillsside cabin in which he had put a large window to see the veranda and hills below.

Anna came up and decorated the broad porch with Buddhist flags, red, yellow, green, white and blue, and they became lovers under the flags on the porch. “You need to be wind-blessed!” she sang, and then the father discovered them in flagrante delicto.

The window glass shatters in his attack, bloodying everyone, and Anna defends Coop, burying a shard in her father's shoulder as he is battering Coop with a stool. The family is shattered (Ondaatje is obvious with the pun) as Anna runs away, Coop survives with the help of Claire and then leaves, and the father shrinks into himself.

The book then divides as the title suggests. Coop becomes a card sharp, a mechanic who can manipulate a deck to guarantee winning in poker. Anna resurfaces in rural France near Gascony as a researcher of a Gallic writer named Lucien Segura. Claire becomes a seeker of facts for a public defender, saving people from dying and sometimes saving the lawyer from himself and his memories of Vietnam.

We follow Coop as he scores big in Vegas, making sure he has four sevens over an aces high full house. He is pursued, however, to repeat the scam, and he refuses and is battered again, this time ending with a hypodermic of heroin in his neck.

Claire rescues Coop who has no memory of what went before. His mind is a blank slate, and he must be reeducated in all social graces including being reconciled with their father. This is a terrible risk for Claire, but it must be done. The past has been erased in Coop's mind, and it is possible that the father and son will meet on common ground.

Anna is in her own pursuit, as Lucien Segura after a successful career as a poet and novelist packed up one day and disappeared from his family. Anna is living in the house where he ended up, but she is trying to unravel why Segura vanished and how he reappeared incognito elsewhere.

There is irony in Segura's name. We are not safe anywhere, Ondaatje is saying. Every character is alone with the world that made them. The convolutions of “Divisadero” are reflected not only in the shattered glass of Coop's window but also in the broken glass that blinds one eye of Segura as a young boy. He can still see, however, the twisted turnings of the church steeple where he grows up, shaped like a spiral, Yeat's gyre coming to a point.

Segura wraps his lifelong enamoration of his childhood neighbor, Marie-Neige, into a series of popular romantic novels, but his own personal life unravels when he participates in World War I and comes back to find Marie-Neige dead. Then he leaves, only to gain another family, a gypsy couple, as he is looking for “a final home for one's remaining days.”

The father of this new family is a thief who changes his name regularly to fit his habitat. Liebard becomes Astolphe, but this father leaves a gift for Segura, his son, Rafael. And it is Rafael who later becomes the lover of Anna as she re-inhabits Segura's house and life.

Ondaatje may be telling us that life goes on. We repeat the same stories of our parents, the ones who took care of us when we were young. At the end of the book swallows fly over a lake in the dusk “as close to their reflections as possible.” We are not any different from the birds.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.