A Family Haunted by Ghosts of Its Past : NEW YEAR’S EVE by Lisa Grunwald; Crown $24, 352 pages

In fiction writing as in football, deception can be an important part of the playbook. Parody, irony, satire, creeping uneasiness and shocking surprise--all depend on a story pretending to be something it isn’t.

In either game, however, it does no good to fake yourself out. Deception of the unintentional sort leads to fumbles. The ball hits the turf, out of control; the reader’s attention skitters in unwelcome directions.

Lisa Grunwald’s third novel purports to be several things--a portrait of a close-knit but unhappy family; an examination of life among the Jewish professional class in New York City--people who can afford private schools, psychiatrists and summer houses in the Berkshires; an exercise in minimalist prose that we trust will deliver, as Joan Didion’s does, plenty of meaning per word; and, finally, a ghost story.

Grunwald (“Summer,” “The Theory of Everything”) seems to have every intention of fulfilling all these promises, but in fact “New Year’s Eve” makes good on only one--the family portrait.

Erica, the narrator, and her twin sister, Heather, are lifelong rivals. In their intense but submerged competition, Heather has usually won. “She had been the first one to smoke a cigarette, try marijuana, get her period, kiss a boy, lose her virginity, marry, have a child. She’d known that she wanted to be a doctor before I’d known I wanted to teach.”

What Erica teaches, conveniently, is mythology, so she is able to season her narrative with Greek, Native American and other perspectives on the significance of twins, the sisters’ desire to please their distant, workaholic father and the loss that strikes Heather when her 4-year-old son, David, is killed in an auto accident.

Erica’s own 4-year-old, Sarah, claims to be able to talk to David in heaven. She passes on increasingly elaborate descriptions of the hereafter as a cosmic preschool where dead kids pass through arts and crafts, snack and gym before climbing the “highest slide” and whizzing back down to be reborn.

As part of the arts and crafts unit, David allegedly dictates to Sarah the specifications for a dollhouse the family is building during the summer of 1990. He, or she, also makes spookily accurate predictions about such events as Erica’s new pregnancy.

By this point, the sisters are in their mid-30s. Their mother is dead. Their once-formidable father is showing signs of senility and fretting about the short time left to him. Their husbands, especially Heather’s, are beginning to wonder whether the family’s self-absorption--shown in flashbacks to New Year’s Eve celebrations as long ago as the 1950s--is healthy.

Erica, too, feels that she ought to relax her grip on the past if she is to grow up, however belatedly, and be a good parent. But the old rivalry with Heather comes back with a vengeance.

Heather joins the dollhouse project, trying to get in contact with David through Sarah. In Erica’s view, Heather is also trying to reestablish her superiority by alienating Sarah’s affections and replacing her dead child with Erica’s live one. Their father, desperate for immortality, approves of Heather’s plan to have a “channeler” interview Sarah.

Grunwald has a nice, light touch with the child psychology, including Sarah’s fantasy life. She skillfully probes the origins of the fractures that run through families, such as a past New Year’s Eve when the twins overheard their father bullying their reluctant mother into trying to have another baby.

But she clearly doesn’t mean for Erica to be an unreliable narrator. For our purposes, though, Erica is more than just a little immature; she is arguably paranoid. Her revulsion at Heather’s overtures to Sarah seems no less irrational than Heather’s belief that David is sending messages from beyond the grave.

Part of the problem is that we blame Erica for Grunwald’s narrowness of focus. The world of “New Year’s Eve” has no room for any issues or problems that don’t involve the family. Its professionals remain oddly undefined because they have no other class of people to rub against.

Along with this narrowness is a disconcerting fuzziness. Grunwald neither backs up Sarah’s mystical claims nor persuasively debunks them. The prose of individual scenes is taut, but many scenes are redundant. In terms of words-to-meaning ratio, this is at best a novella padded out to novel length.