New Englanders, I’ve found in living among them, are not the most garrulous breed of American. And as one native-born woman informed me recently, speech is considered downright ostentatious in the state of Maine.

How, then, to explain the chatty citizens populating Cathie Pelletier’s seventh novel, Beaming Sonny Home? Set in a fictional blue-collar town in Maine’s northern interior, the book’s bickering conversations are studded with “Mamas” and “honeys” and “ain’ts.” The author, Cathie Pelletier, divides her time between Toronto and Nashville: perhaps some of her Southern living has crept into the mouths of her Northern creations. Unfortunately, the dialogue is not the only dissonant aspect of this novel. What begins as an amiable, mildly absurd tale of family dysfunction lurches finally into unconvincing melodrama, with a jarring denouement.

The story is told by Mattie Gifford, mother of three battling adult daughters and one sweet but aimless boy, Sonny. In true ’90s style, the family’s women have reunited in front of the television for a live news event. It seems that Sonny – a charismatic “one-man party in full swing” – has taken two women and a poodle hostage in his estranged wife’s trailer down south in Bangor. Knowing Sonny, the Gifford women see the stand-off as just another of his wild but harmless stunts. Even his hostages are charmed. But Mattie struggles with feelings of genuine helplessness and maternal regret at the sight of her favourite child making the biggest mistake of his life.

As a writer, Pelletier likes to play it both light and heavy, broad and narrow. But this requires dexterity, and the narrative that she constructs here is simply too flimsy to accommodate these extremes. The character of Mattie is the most sustained success: readers will find her salty assessments of the limits of maternal and romantic love enjoyably frank. But as Sonny’s adventure collapses, so does Mattie’s emotional believability, and the story’s authority along with it. There is even a final bit of incongruous symbolism involving a jigsaw puzzle called “Jesus Rising” that will induce slack-jawed horror in Christians and atheists alike. Ultimately, for every moment of hard-won truth in this odd novel, there are many more as cloying and forced as a mediocre country song.