This novel is at first slow to engage, seeming strangely thin and banal for quite a chunk of pages, and if that slowness is intentional then the precise intention is unclear. The author, experienced now in this, her fourth book, may mean to reflect the detached way its young heroine, Anita Mostyn, feels about her own life. When Anita sits down on a Bulgarian balcony with a book, the third person narrator observes: "If reading were a destination both into and away from herself, Anita didn't get there." It is not until the story suddenly swerves in an unexpected direction, subverting the "emotionally-damaged-woman-finds-herself-through-foreign-travel" cliché, that we, as readers, are shaken awake behind the wheel and start to pay more attention to the road.

Anita is an immediately recognisable psychological type, the product of a pressurised upbringing. She operates in terms of "self-sabotage" and talks in exactly that kind of psychobabble, to the irritation of her overbearing and intellectual mother, Veronica. Anita's core feeling of not fully "meet[ing] requirements" is described again and again, with wry variations, as when she fondly remembers a pet dog who, expected merely to be "good" rather than "to excel", was the most relaxed member of the Mostyn family. An art teacher once told Anita she "spent too much time trying to be perfect", and her brittle physique is emphasised without spelling out an eating disorder.

This personality type is as accurately and realistically portrayed as every detail in the novel, down to the smell of boiling turkey stock in her aging parents' Hampshire home (a setting described far more memorably than anything in the Chelsea address of the book's title). Yet in real life such self-pitying girls and women are rarely very interesting  largely because of their indirect self-absorption. One of the elements that sets this novel decisively apart from more straightforward genre fiction is its continual commentary on such self-absorption: gradually showing us how little Anita ever tries to imagine the problems of her envied siblings, for example, and constantly undermining her insecure self-assessments by showing the numerous characters who care about her or are attracted to or intrigued by her (right down to one brother's future father-in-law, who has never even met her).

Another success is the book's unconventional structure, which skips around chronologically, without much signposting, in order to make the point, unobtrusively yet effectively, that we know our own lives to be "loops and circles with the centre of the circles somewhat elusive" yet seldom think of other people's lives in the same terms, assuming that they work by a "forward-step model, crossing off the To Do list". Only in the very final passage of the book is Davey's signature obliqueness perhaps taken to an extreme that feels artificial.

The broader ending redeems the novel's beginning and the responses it provoked to Anita as a "type", including a section that rejects the moral reductivism and pat analysis of a group therapy session in which the central conflicts of Anita's life are simplistically debated by well-meaning but clueless strangers. A hilarious detail about the group's facilitator balancing a possibly imaginary lost contact lens on the palm of his hand throughout the sessions, half-blind and distracted, is pure realism and, at the same time, the subtlest kind of symbolism.

Janet Davey's fourth novel begins in the 1980s of Anita Mostyn's childhood with her older brothers, Mark and Barney. "The two Mostyn boys had inscrutable faces. Pale and oval with neat little mouths and firm jaws  like male Madonnas. When the telephone rang: 'Leave the room, Netticles. This will be a private conversation,' though, more often than not, retreating, Anita would hear the words, 'My mother is out.'"
The syntax isn't showy or faux-archaic, it's crisply contemporary; but it's complex and promises that nothing offered for our interest will be blatant, or banal. There's so much packed in there  class (the nickname, the boys' precocious vocabulary and phrasing), comedy (those inscrutable little boy-faces), relationship (Anita's exclusion  and perhaps the hollowness of what she's excluded from).
The novel will be Anita's story first and foremost, sliding in and out of her original, skewed way of seeing; but we know from the first sentence that Davey claims the whole freedom of her omniscience (it can't be the little girl Anita who sees those male-Madonna faces). So the novel's narrative mode isn't the more familiar one  clingy close-third-person. There's even a scene much later, at Barney's second wedding, when we believe for several pages that we are watching Anita through the eyes of Barney's new father-in-law, encountering her for the first time. ("She was a bit of a rebel maybe. He had that impression.") Then we realise, as he realises, that the girl he's looking at isn't Anita at all, he has made a mistake.
No perception is for certain, in Davey's world. The flow of consciousness as she renders it is "never a clear pane of glass", explaining things, binding them together in a meaning. It's characteristic of the lovely indirection of the novel  and of its heroine  that Anita goes to have an adventure in Bulgaria and comes home, defeated, after only a few days, but continues to send texts and photographs as if she's still there. ("All good. Loving your apartment.")
At first sight, the Mostyns, bankers and solicitors, are an awful family, snobbish and conforming and oblivious: poor Anita. In place of intimacy, her brothers and her parents exchange displays of cleverness and information. Anita collapses before Barney's wedding and spends two days in bed: when she gets up her father greets her with "How was Bulgaria? Did you get to see the Thracian tombs?"; he tells her at length about Herodotus.
Their mother Veronica is overbearing, favouring her boys, disappointed in her daughter ("Will you be any good at negotiation?"). The brothers are locked in bitter rivalry (which Anita, drowning in her own inadequacy, only half registers); Barney is duller, Mark is more complex, cleverer, and perhaps gay (we're never sure, because Anita isn't sure). He can't surface out of that childhood when he was all promise of future brilliance; his performances of angst  he crashes his hands down on the piano: "I can't bloody play any more" are self-dramatising and heartfelt at once.
Underneath this comedy of social types, so exact and so funny, Davey catches deeper truths about how the Mostyns live, through smells and textures and effects of light. In their mews flat in London, her parents eat joylessly in a windowless dining room: "Howard manfully chewed the pieces of the previous day's roast potatoes that his wife had chopped up and added to the cauliflower [cheese]." Surfaces are cluttered and sticky in their Hampshire country house; after Christmas it's filled with the vapour of boiling turkey stock. But when disaster comes  as it does, on the eve of Barney's first wedding, blighting the family  at least their habit of confident control gives them something to do: it's Anita who goes to pieces.
And nine years later she is stranded in her 30s, single after a succession of unsatisfactory love affairs, in an unsatisfactory job, and pretending to be in Bulgaria. Yet in this novel of shifting perspectives, we needn't trust that Anita has the last word on herself. She thinks she's inconvenient and disregarded and at best acquiescent; but to the others she might appear elusive, evasive  she might look like the one who got away. She might be wilfully, or helplessly, oblivious to real possibilities of connection that come her way (with Mark, with Mark's friend Nick Halsey).
The end of the novel is beautifully nuanced, without forced resolution. Davey (pictured) captures the strangeness of our ordinary days, and the heroism of what Anita Brookner calls "the mighty task" of keeping oneself afloat. We're lucky to have such an intelligent chronicler of our present  and of the dirty, noisy beauty of contemporary London.
Tessa Hadley's novel Married Love is published by Janathan Cape.