From its first virtuosic, almost page-long sentence, The End declares itself as a work that requires attention, the heft of the subject matter matched by the ornamented tooling of the prose. In America, where it was published a year ago, it drew comparisons with Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow and Graham Greene, and though this raises the suspicion of hyperbole, there is an intensity of purpose to Salvatore Scibona's endeavour that is decidedly uncommon in a debut novel. It's not surprising that Scibona, an Italian-American who worked on the book for a decade, has made it on to the New Yorker's "20 under 40" list of writers to watch.

The setting is a mostly Italian immigrant community in Ohio, the fictional Elephant Park, "a vast, decaying, ash-bedecked, enchanted city", seen in kaleidoscopic intervals over the seven decades leading up to 1953. The narrative moves between a handful of characters, among them a bereaved baker, a seamstress, a balding, indomitable lady abortionist and a lanky high-school Jesuit, their lives connected by ties both homely and sinister. A few pivotal moments  a lunch, a religious parade, a rape  reoccur from different perspectives, a technique that proves devastatingly effective. But though Scibona is a deft and intricate plotter, the weight of his interest palpably lies with his characters' inner lives, and with the sense they make of those large and unashamedly modernist concerns: death, history, the composition of the self.

To pull this off requires all kinds of skills, not least the happy knack of convincing the reader that all this elegant surmising about the universe and man's place within it belongs to the character, and not to the author. If Scibona fails in this  and he does, by a whisker  he can at least console himself that he is in good company: one of Woolf's flaws as a writer was that the internal registers of her characters often remained imperfectly differentiated, subjugated to the broader project of catching how the mind itself moves. In The End, too, the voices blur, both in their tones and their subject matter. The abortionist Constanza is as preoccupied with the meanings of selfhood as the teenager Ciccio; both are equally prone to unburdening themselves of gloriously turned soliloquies.

There is no doubt whatsoever of the beauty or brilliance of Scibona's writing, but without the anchoring of character, it teeters occasionally toward self-indulgence. When Constanza remembers  albeit through the blurring lens of the third person  the devil visiting her in her garden, "dressed like Young Werther, in a blue jacket, yellow vest and pants, and tricorn hat", the reader may well feel a frisson of suspicion. When did Constanza read Goethe? It is not of a piece with her childhood in rural Italy, nor her years as the immigrant wife of a "small-scale shoe manufacturer" in Elephant Park. Did she read it in Italian or English? Was this while she was learning to be an abortionist or later?

Elsewhere, though, the free flow of thought is almost miraculously caught. Walking through the city, Constanza's mind drifts in a single sentence from the immediacy of the present to the distant, ungraspable past: "There was a scent  she passed a woman in the intersection, a mother of nine but slender, clean-compacted, the name was, the name was; but she must not try to remember, lest she fail  a smell of soap, hair, and something bitter besides, and it dropped her into a crevice many ages old, accessible only via the nose and only if the scent was lost again at once: I have opened my sister's carpetbag to see that she does not take my leggings with her when she leaves us forever tomorrow." This is free indirect speech  the modernist tool of choice  at its boneless, yielding best.

But despite the overwhelming richness of the language, what really makes The End tick is the nasty thriller it's wound around. It is here that the resemblance to Greene becomes clear, in the masterful pairing of existential questions to a tight, febrile plot and the precise, nearly cruel, use of coincidence. This is the motor that makes reading the second half of the book an entirely different experience to the sometimes stagnant first, and makes one wonder almost anxiously what Scibona could do if only he cut a little more swiftly to the chase.

From the first dozen words of this debut the reader knows that this is not another dysfunctional-contemporary-American-family novel. It is instead a jackstraw tangle of dysfunctional not-yet-American families. The characters are mostly Sicilian immigrants living in Ohio in the early 20th century, their lives caught in the fly-paper of their pasts, their language a combination of the private dialects of their native villages, a laboriously correct Italian and unsure English. There is a foreign feel to the book, as though it is a not quite fluent translation  crabbed, refolded, flecked with archaic phrases and beliefs, shot through with Joycean obscurities, all of which give the reader a strong sense of standing just inside the door of the characters' shifting worlds. This interplay of intimacy between the reader and the work, the entry into the strangeness and delirium of others' thoughts, is a little reminiscent of Panos Karnezis's 2002 collection of short stories, Little Infamies.

Although we know that the abstract past does not exist except in memory, Scibona's characters cannot escape the weight of what has happened, of what they remember. The concerns of these people, who have all torn themselves away from their beginnings  why they've done so is an important question that does not necessarily have an answer  leaving but never arriving, beginning but never ending, are the concerns of all who grapple with massive change both personal and historical: genetic identity, love and its disguises, sin and error, questions of God and Being, the human condition. Again and again the characters take leave of each other as though departures must have meaningful ends. In these actions is the awful juggling act between what was and what is.

Most of the characters are familiar with physical labour, something rare in American novels. The working-class characters appear as full-bodied intimates. Work-obsessed baker Rocco LaGrassa, whose life follows something he identifies as a "swerve", is abandoned by his wife Loveypants. The expert abortionist, Mrs Marini, is haunted by the harping, carping red-headed ghost of Nico, her dead husband. She plans to train a young neighbour, Lina, to succeed her, but Lina, obedient to her parents, marries Vincenzo ("Enzo"), a bricklayer from a rural village east of Naples, a man to whom her father has sold her in order to buy land for a grape farm. As for marriage, "now all of Lina's parts would come suddenly into order, as though a rope was pulled tight".

The grape farm itself becomes a domineering character, exerting its negative force on the characters. Enzo yearns for children but Lina does not conceive. After some years, a murky rape and the subsequent birth of a son, Lina leaves Enzo and disappears. Unknowing bastard Ciccio, both compliant and headstrong, is involuntarily sticky with the resin of his chopped-up family's history. After the unfortunate Enzo is killed, Lina, hardened into a quite different person, returns. But the question of the ownership of Enzo's house and the distance between mother and teenage son is too great for anything but hostility. Ciccio too must leave.

Scibona loves language and recognises the power of using the right word. He seems better educated than most American writers, with a strong vocabulary and rich ideas that urge him to build complex sentences. Although occasionally it feels as though the author is reaching a little too hard for effect ("unlonesomed", "unlost"), he is authoritative when it comes to detail: the way the metal reinforcements on the corners of young Loveypants's trunk "hissed on the ice as she dragged it by a belt tied to its handle", the geology beneath Ciccio's feet on his way to school, bricklayer Enzo's printless fingertips worn "as blank as glass". The imagery is compelling and beautifully crafted. Before her marriage, Lina compares herself to a Sicilian peasant way of cooking poultry:

"Her life had been like the clay that she and her mother and her sister dug out of the creek bed and moulded around a turkey or a capon at Christmastime, careful to make the mould in the shape of the bird inside, like a sarcophagus; and they baked it all slowly, and took it out to cool, and painted feathers on it with whitewash  and eyes with shoe polish, and its wattle with her mother's lipstick  and waited for her father to come to the table and say that he blessed it, and the three of them, and Saint Joseph, his patron, and for him to hold the hammer and smash it while they cheered and the steam came out.

"She would meet the man-in-waiting on Saturday. And if she accepted him  she could not see why she would not accept him  then he would be the one, a month from now, for whose sake she would paint the case around herself and let him smash her."

There are many more memorable images, such as Mrs Marini's sense of being "in a place but never of it, like a pearl in a cake", or how boys eating watermelon "shot the seeds off their tongues like savages at passing dogs". To the reader's enrichment, The End is an outstanding work in all the right ways.

Annie Proulx's Fine Just the Way It Is is published by Fourth Estate.