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In the 15 years since she made her National Book Award-winning debut with Three Junes, Julia Glass has written a series of novels notable for their intricately braided narratives, dry wit, and generous embrace of flawed, fallible characters. Those gifts are on pleasing display again in A House Among the Trees, a lovely meditation on the mysteries of creativity and its costs, not just to creators, but to those who surround them. The artist in question here is Mort Lear, a famous childrens book author whose accidental death sparks a swirl of maneuvers and memories that ultimately lead to a fraught weekend of revelations and reconciliations.

Always deft with plotting, Glass builds to that weekend from her first sentence, Today, the actor arrives. Morty agreed to this visit, we learn, shortly before his fatal fall from the pitched roof of his Connecticut home. He was flattered that Oscar-winning movie star Nicholas Greene had been cast to play him in a biopic, but its just one more thing to deal with for Mortys longtime, live-in assistant, Tomasina Daulair. Tommy is reeling from the unwelcome discovery that Morty named her his heir and literary executor, assigning her a series of detailed responsibilities as variously remote from her experience as foraging for mushrooms or Olympic diving. The most unpleasant of these will be informing a New York museum happily anticipating the bequest of Mortys artwork, letters, and archives that he has reneged on that promise in his will.

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With six densely packed but lucid pages of exposition, Glass sets the scene for all that follows and dangles tantalizing hints of disclosures yet to come, such as the reason for Mortys vindictive change to his will. Its a pleasure to be in the hands of a consummate storyteller, and Glasss mastery is particularly evident in her skillful use of Mortys obvious but never overbearing resemblance to the late Maurice Sendak. Yes, theyre both crotchety gay men from Brooklyn (by way of Tucson in Mortys case) who moved to Connecticut after establishing their reputations with controversial books once deemed too scary and dark for kids. From this factual scaffolding Glass constructs a fully imagined fictional figure. The traumas that inform Mortys art are quite different from those Sendak acknowledged to his biographer; more importantly, they resonate with the experiences of other characters as three-dimensional and engaging as he is.

Tommy stands at the center of this varied portrait gallery, wondering whether she gave up too much to spend 25 years as Mortys wife without the sex. This is the bitter assessment of her estranged brother Dani, still resentful that as a boy he was the unwitting model for the protagonist of the book that launched Lear like a NASA space shot. (Those familiar with Sendaks work will enjoy the clever allusions to Where the Wild Things Are in her descriptions of Mortys Colorquake.)

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Meredith Galarza, director of the jilted museum, also feels betrayed by Morty; his flirtatious letters and their bibulous lunches gave no hint of the rage he felt when she told him his art would be sharing space with the work of a younger, hipper childrens author in the museums expensive new building in trendy post-industrial Brooklyn.

Only Greene feels no ambivalence or animosity toward Morty; he understands from his own experience that the pursuit of art involves a certain level of selfishness requiring those around you to adapt or get out of your way. That may be why Morty before his death confided to Nick a startling truth about his childhood even more twisted than the story he publicly told of abuse by an older man.

It takes some plot manipulation to get Meredith and Dani in a car headed to Connecticut on the weekend Nick is visiting, but most readers will accept it. Glass has created such rich back stories for these appealing characters and interwoven them so compellingly that we want to see them work things out together. Putting all four in the same house at the same time may not be entirely plausible, but it feels artistically right. The weekend brings one more big reveal (and a charmingly unlikely tryst), but its central events are the quiet moments of reckoning between people who have learned to forgive each other and themselves. Avoiding clichs about tortured, exploitative genius, Glass crafts a thoughtful, warm-hearted tale about the choices each of us makes, with consequences inevitably both good and bad.

A HOUSE AMONG THE TREES

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By Julia Glass

Pantheon, 368 pp., $27.95

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Selfish Sendak-like author's death spawns meditation on art and costs it exacts - The Boston Globe