Pamela Holm loves San Francisco, and she knows the city. More than anything else, one leaves her first novel, The Night Garden, with the clear sense of her knowledge of and affection for the city she and her characters call home. The novel deals with lust and its destructive consequences, the minute attentions of curious people, art, the effect of geography, and more, told in direct prose and at such a good clip that it is a quick and generally satisfying read.

Dawn Mackenzie and her daughter, Jewel, move into an apartment building with a lower floor they can rent. They need the money. Having lived for five years with Dawn’s former boyfriend, the irrepressible and charming David, they are now on their own. As they try to move on, they meet Harlan after, having cheated on his wife, Macie, with a dancer, Sofia, is thrown out. Harlan rents the bottom floor of Dawn’s house, and the three become friends and confidantes in the process of reclaiming the weedy garden in the backyard. The total relationship helps each of them—Dawn, Harlan, and Jewel—move on from the events that have, in different ways, devastated their lives.

Holm moves skillfully between the several stories, moving from one character’s perspective to another without contrivance or a missed beat. She has real strength as a manipulator of scene, at maintaining the interdependence of the stories. As well, the end makes use of the various strands the novel presents and concludes with a sense that the story goes on, while wrapping up the narrative fairly well.

While the skill at managing scene and drive is very much on display, the characters feel stuck at times in a surface wittiness that pervades even their inner thoughts. While it is quite credible that, given their situations, they would be absorbed in their own shortcomings and fickle self-regard, the witty and sardonic tone of so many of their observations comes off as insincere, even glib. Early in the novel, Dawn, dripping with woe, looks for a parking space so that she can drop her precocious and grim daughter, Jewel, at a dance. Her inner monologue runs, “Dawn Mackenzie, ex-girlfriend of David. Died of a self-inflicted wound to the heart. The deceased is survived by a morbid child of nine.” That said, in a later scene when Macie wallows in hurt by playing her estranged husband’s saddest records, the moment is poignant with her decision to inflict as much pain on herself as she can.

These characters are talkers; they are frank, funny, sometimes treacherous. But they are also often caught in moments of preaching. Sofia, an unlikely moralist, delivers the single person’s mystification at the doings of strange marrieds: “I don’t know why you people do it . . . I mean what’s in it for you anyway.” Harlan’s pious response is something predictable about stability, and they go on with their discussion. It’s not as though people don’t have these conversations. Rather, they are so typical of what passes for conversation that they do not merit the full-on respect of dialogue, of scene, of making them into such a prominent feature of the book.

When she is at her best, Holm gives us characters stumbling over the consequences of their decisions, mulling the specific aspects of a past that still haunts them, in the way the seasonal shifts of the city haunt and affect the lives of the people who love there. They may be able to ignore the city moment to moment, but its cumulative effect, like the effects of their past, makes of them products of a region. And Holm has made the fog and chill summers, the multiple hues of pedestrians and the swell of hills part of a lovely and crafted homage to her city and home, creating the most affecting part of the novel.