Adam Haslett’s “Mothers and Sons,” set in 2011, takes place in two seemingly disparate locations — the landscape of immigrants’ legal proceedings in New York City, and a women’s retreat in northern Vermont.

Peter, an immigration lawyer who works with asylum applicants, narrates the New York sections with a kind of exhausted resignation, stumbling over his concern for a particular client. Haslett chooses third person to give us Ann’s view of the world: As she welcomes visitors to her “intentional community” in the countryside, she reflects on the work of her life, including her previous post as a minister and her relationship with her son Peter, the novel’s intermittent narrator. The prose is especially fine during Ann’s lengthy meditation sessions, in which Haslett reveals his expert sense of his characters.

Romantic entanglements flicker throughout the novel — for Peter, memories of his first love, Jared, and exchanges with Cliff, his occasional companion; for Ann, recollections of leaving her late husband, Richard, for Clare. But the clear passion, for both Peter and Ann, is work. Haslett writes about Peter’s job with unsentimental clarity, heaping the pages with characters and their plights, without following each case to its conclusion. The novel nods to its formal limitations here, to the impossibility of capturing every single story.

In recollections of his childhood in the rectory, Peter recalls Ann’s absorption in books and in the church. To his mother’s invitations to Vermont, his response is a kind of echo of hers: He cannot leave his work. His boss, Phoebe, warns that “some clients get under your skin,” but Peter’s dedication to his work extends beyond his concern for others; work is the centerpiece of his life, and he has allowed it to prevent him from forming deep relationships.

Although Ann built her retreat alongside Clare, they, too, question their own commitment to the place. “‘We offer people something, I still believe that,’” Clare says. “‘But isn’t it best for us, more than anyone?’” A favored client asks Peter a similar question: “I bet you do this to feel like a good person, right?’”

Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown)

This question applies to both Ann and Peter, one set of several mothers and sons in the book. Haslett gives them great intellect, determination and professional acumen, but their own relationship appears to suffer from silence and absence. Their vocations are time-consuming and outwardly focused; when Peter must, for a time, stop working, he compares his apartment to “the set of a play.”

Claiming “the performance is over,” he enters a flashback that wildly complicates his history with Ann and his overall diligence. Well-paced and elegantly written, Haslett’s latest is a haunting work.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s debut novel, “The Other Wife,” is coming this year from Riverhead. She is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

Mothers and Sons

By: Adam Haslett.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 323 pages, $29.