Novelist Hyatt Bass digs deep into a family’s collective psyche with her first book, “The Embers” (Henry Holt, $25), a riveting examination of a high-profile clan and its fall from grace.

Bass, who’s from a fairly high-profile family herself — yes, those Basses of Fort Worth, Texas, the ones that Bass Hall is named for — sports a laid-back style of writing that one might, at first, mistake for lack of edge. Far from it, “The Embers” builds like the fire its title conjures, glowing a little, then suddenly bursting into sparks of narrative that make it nigh on impossible to put down.

Bass tells the story of the sublimely talented, horribly tormented Ascher family. The patriarch, Joe, is a once-celebrated playwright and actor who hasn’t written anything worthwhile in 12 years. His ex-wife, Laura, had a promising acting career but has settled into enjoying her much-less-chaotic second marriage. In her spare time, she gets a little too deep into the business of her and Joe’s grown daughter, Emily, a public defender who’s juggling a difficult trial with planning her wedding.

The ghost haunting the Aschers, and the narrative, is Thomas, Emily’s brother, who died at the family’s vacation home in the Berkshires, under circumstances that aren’t fully revealed till the end.

Much of the book deals with the fraught relationship between Emily and her father, whom she wants to walk her down the aisle. But since the death of her brother when she was 15, Emily’s so estranged from Joe that she can’t even work up the nerve to tell him she’s engaged. She ascribes just about everything wrong in her life to her father: “And it was mythic, really, the way her father had destroyed everything: his house, his family, and of course most tragically, his son.”

Joe, meanwhile, is coming to grips with the emotional loss of Emily by developing a platonic, semi-mentoring relationship with a girl named Ingrid, whom he meets at a hotel he’s reviewing for a travel magazine. As he captures his recollections of their interactions on his ever-present Dictaphone, Joe realizes he may have the seeds of the best play he’s ever written. And that’s a good thing; he’s under pressure to write a new work as the headlining piece for a famed theater festival that’s planning to honor him.

Both Joe and Laura see in their daughter a lack of empathy toward others and a growing pomposity that they find troubling and the reader will find puzzling, especially toward the end of the book when Emily performs an act of compassion that’s almost offhand for her, yet overwhelmingly affecting.

The book has a distinctly “Rashomon” quality, as the three main characters dissect what happened in their past, each drawing widely varying conclusions. The reader will have many moments of mentally yelling at a character, “No, you’re so wrong!” about another character’s motivations, actions or character.

That’s the penetrating beauty of “The Embers”: It will inspire readers to examine their own judgments about those they love, and perhaps give someone another chance. Bass is a new author with an old soul, and a talent worth tending.