There is much to relish in the notion of a novel which sets itself on a tiny island cut off from the world. When a nugget of land is all that a handful of characters have available to them, and when these characters must build nothing short of complete new lives, the novelist's work of invention acquires a double intensity. The reader's prospect, meanwhile, is of a deepened immersion. It's with rich promise, then, that TC Boyle's 14th novel moors to its rugged kingdom, "an island tossed out in the ocean like an afterthought", eight hours by boat from the Californian coast.

Opening on New Year's Day 1888 and staying with the island and its inhabitants up to the early 1940s, San Miguel is a stylistic departure for Boyle. His novels have ranged over many subjects and many eras, but always with a swipe of satire, always with a glinting eye to the unflattering realities of what we are  and of what circumstances can persuade us to become. Here, in a beautiful wasteland to which a person comes only to raise sheep or to poach them, these kinds of realities are all the more nakedly present, but this time around it's an altogether more earnest pen that Boyle takes to their contours. Part of the reason for this may be that his source materials included family memoirs written by real-life colonists of San Miguel, some of whom give their names to his characters.

The novel is told through the voices of three women  each, in her own time, default Queen of San Miguel. We first meet Marantha, a TB sufferer who has come to this wind-throttled island in hope of healing air; we move on to her teenage daughter Edith, left on the island without her mother; and conclude with Elise, a 38-year-old New York librarian who shares her idealistic new husband's dream of a self-sustaining life. Each woman faces significant hardship: isolated and for the most part impoverished, and stuck with men who try them to different degrees  Marantha's husband has brought her here under false pretences; Edith's stepfather (the same man) has imprisoned her here; and Elise's husband Herbie, although sweet-natured, is at heart childish and unpredictable. Boyle's narrative is presented as emerging from deep within each woman's mind as she struggles with life on San Miguel; as Marantha frets and Edith schemes and Elise keeps a patient eye on her family and their happy, unorthodox path.

It should be epic, and Boyle is skilful enough to make it feel as though it is reaching in that direction. His evocations of landscape are vivid and he can dream up a cast of characters  the families, their hired hands, their visitors by sea and later by air  with verve. But his narrative is bafflingly restless, bolting from one inkling of dramatic possibility to the next. This is a tactic which seems fitting early on in the respective sections, as his women strive to understand so many strange new elements of island life, but by the third section it has grown quite exhausting, and it scatters his plot like so many grains rather than planting it where it might deepen and grow. Thirty years and 300 pages into our readerly tenure on this outpost, we are still seeing new characters and new crises flash past our eyes, presented as though of vital importance, only to harmlessly dissolve a page later, so that the next subsection can introduce and dispatch yet another example of their kind.

Boyle has always been a high-octane writer, but this is a narrative knocked sideways by its own freneticism. As we career from one plot-point to the next, from island visitors to discovered objects to the historical events which come to seem like an overly forced frame, the women's voices themselves seem increasingly distracted. Elise's consciousness, for example, acquires a "This, or no, that" pattern which seems not truly hers but that of her jittery husband, whose manic energy in turn seems infected by the jumpiness of the narrative itself. The casualty is the kind of close, consistent and crisply distinct point of view that Boyle very much needs if he is to paint the inner and outer lives of these three very different women.

 Belinda McKeon's novel Solace is published by Picador.