There is a scene, late in Leslie Epstein’s new faux-memoir novel, San Remo Drive, in which narrator Richard Jacobi — a clear stand-in for Epstein — shares a fond memory with a French diplomat in Los Angeles. When Jacobi was a child in the 1940s, the novelist Romain Gary would visit his parents’ Hollywood home and read aloud letters he had received from his mother, a Jew trapped in North Africa during the occupation. The diplomat then tells Jacobi the real story, which is that Gary’s mother had already died, and after her death a faithful friend mailed these letters to her son in America.

This story — shocking and poignant — might serve as a metaphor for all of Epstein’s work (he is the author of eight other books of fiction, including the 1979 novel King of the Jews), but especially the highly personal San Remo Drive. While San Remo Drive has the aura of a memoir — it’s subtitled " A Novel from Memory, " and Epstein tells us in a prefatory note " the events and characters of this novel have passed through the magnetic field of the imagination ... and all that is fanciful has been caught in the seine net of memory " — it is actually a meditation on survival: personal, erotic, and political.

San Remo Drive is narrated in the first person by Richard Jacobi, a world-famous painter who — like Epstein — is the son of a famous Hollywood screenwriter (in Leslie’s case, Philip G. Epstein, who with his brother Julius wrote, among other films, Casablanca). He grew up, along with his younger brother Barton and bohemian mother Lottie, during the movies’ heyday, until his father was destroyed by the blacklist in the 1950s. The book is delicately balanced between the earlier sections, which take place in the 1940s and 1950s and are centered around the family’s palatial Hollywood home (lost to them after the father’s death), and the second half, which takes place in the present after Jacobi buys the old house and moves in with his new wife and two adopted Native American sons.

The book’s structure — in which the remembrances of the past inform the present — at first feels overly explicit, even obvious. In " Malibu, " we see Lottie becoming involved in a disastrous relationship after her husband’s death; in " Tijuana, " Richard and Barton discover how scary, and liberating, eroticism can be when they go with friends on a sex trip to Mexico; in " Negroes " (as well as " Desert " ), the limits of the Jacobis’ liberalism are exposed when they have to deal with the reality of African-American lives.

In the book’s second half, " San Remo Drive, " all these themes are replayed in the present as the narrator grapples with his second marriage falling apart, his complicated sexual relationship with Madeline (who has been his lifelong love and muse since childhood), and his identity as a white, secular, adamantly non-practicing Jew raising two Navajo boys in a world in which they are all aware of the specter of the Holocaust and the fact that " bad people wanted to kill all the Indians, too. "

By the end of the book, the neatness of Epstein’s structure yields considerable rewards while also exposing how much further the book might have gone. In many ways, the themes Epstein has always explored — exile, the power of memory to liberate and oppress, eroticism’s profound power to both aid and inhibit the creation of art, and the crushing, as well as redemptive, power of history — are explored here in new ways. Scenes such as little Richard’s sexual connection to a black man working on his parents’ house, or the eeriness of Barton and Richard watching their father’s political demise as they flip back and forth between televised HUAC hearings and a Gorgeous George wrestling match, shock and disturb, while provoking us to see the world differently. While his nervy narrative techniques are reminiscent of those in Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail (Norton, 1999) or even the more conventional Pinto and Sons (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), he takes them further here, and to a large degree, it pays off.

Unfortunately, much of San Remo Drive is so good that I wanted more. Epstein is so ambitious — and delivers so much — that the book’s flaws show through. San Remo Drive never really comes together as a novel. As provocative as much of it is, there are times — especially at the end — when the separate stories wrap up too neatly. One thinks of the perfection of the story about Romain Gary’s mother in which writing is both a trick and a salve to make the present bearable, and wishes that San Remo Drive was able to do that as perfectly. As it is, Epstein’s book, even in its imperfection, gives us an indication of how art can heal the past.