Margaret is now a 35-year-old magazine editor in New York City, and a newly divorced mother of two young daughters. It’s the beginning of the #MeToo movement and most of the pieces she works on are first-person accounts of unwanted male attention. The pitches run the gamut, and come in with manipulative urgency — “by speaking up we, by telling our stories we, never again will we,” Margaret thinks. “How did one become part of it, speak on behalf of it — that confident plural voice?”

Margaret is ambivalent about these stories and her own. What narrative should her childhood experience fall into? And how should she tell this story to herself as she contends with being both a parent to girls and a daughter to an aging mother, Elizabeth, on whose watch Margaret suffered?

Jones is interested in the liminal space Margaret finds herself in, a space more psychological than generational: a state of consciousness that hovers between her past and present, resembling the uncertain and unstable experience of sleep. The novel excels when exploring this extrasensory place where we come to terms with our lives.

If this sounds fey, part of the pleasure of “Sleep” is that it’s grounded in the prosaic; it traces a series of familial episodes that should feel banal but that are instead shot through with feeling.

Take a scene where Margaret goes to pick up her daughters from her ex-husband Ezra’s apartment. She’s trying to corral the kids, but they are stalling. Five-year-old Jo keeps knocking things out of the medicine cabinet, including Ezra’s new girlfriend’s anti-wrinkle cream. Eight-year-old Helen is coloring a picture of her grandmother’s house in New Jersey. Shortly they will all be visiting this house for a weekend to celebrate Jo’s birthday. The stakes of the weekend are high: Elizabeth is overbearing, demanding, matriarch of the unsaid. The stakes of Margaret picking up her daughters are low. It’s in the intersection of the two that Jones brandishes her artistry:

Helen stood in her single sock, taping her picture up against the window. The sky outside was golden with late-day sun, but the light stopped abruptly at the glass. Inside was already beginning the blue evening, shadows padding the corners of the room. On the couch was Ezra, watching her, looking more cheerful than she’d seen him in weeks.

It’s chilling: the ex-husband gleefully watching his wife trying to shepherd the kids while he just sits there. Helen innocently drawing the house where Margaret suffered. The light that stops at the window.