ON A SNOWY NIGHT IN Boston, after a political speech by Jesse Jackson at the Kennedy School, a young man steps backwards off a kerb and into the path of a car. He doesn’t see its headlights, because he is absorbed in an argument with his father. He doesn’t see the woman who has been watching him, and who just has time to shove him out of the car’s path, and take the hit herself.

Chance and accident rule this novel. Ann Patchett’s characters may believe that they possess their lives and construct their own stories, but as the narrative twists and swerves these assumptions are swept away. Just as a regulated and smoothly-running city can be paralysed by a snowstorm, so the five people who step out of the Kennedy School will never live out the futures they hold in their heads.

Bernard Doyle, a widower and former Mayor of Boston, plans to draw his adopted sons Tip and Teddy into political careers. Their presence at Jackson’s speech is part of Doyle’s strategy. Doyle is white Boston Irish, and his adopted sons are black, like Tennessee Moser, the woman who pushes Tip out of the car’s path.

Her daughter, Kenya, gives the novel its title. She is 11 years old and already a promising track star, but where Tip and Teddy have grown up in privilege, Kenya lives in a housing project and stays home alone at nights while her mother works as a carer. Adoption has transformed the fates of the two boys, who are also Tennessee’s sons.

Patchett tells this complex story of inheritance and loss with accomplished ease. Tip and Teddy have been taken out of poverty, cherished, given an expensive education and a home of one of Boston’s best streets. But they have lost their mother twice, first when they were put up for adoption, and when their second mother died of cancer. Here, Patchett touches lightly on what else they may have lost by being brought up in a white environment where they will always be the black children whom Mayor Doyle and his wife adopted. She will return to this theme with greater force towards the end of the novel.

Kenya, like the opera singer Roxane Coss in Patchett’s last novel Bel Canto, has a talent that is remarkable in itself and in the effect it has on others. In a sequence that comes close to fantasy, Kenya is taken to run at Harvard’s Gordon Track by her brother Tip, on the morning after the accident. She runs so brilliantly that Tip feels that he is “seeing greatness, like he was in the room watching Watson and Crick put the final touches to their model of DNA”.

There are whistles, cheers and applause. It’s a strong, sensitive piece of description and yet it exposes a flaw that keeps getting in the way of the novel’s achievements: a cloying streak of sentimentality in the way that its characters see themselves, or are seen by others.

An element of fantasy or wish-fulfilment also emerges in a long sequence where Tennessee is dreaming or hallucinating after surgery, and her dead best friend comes to visit her. In plot terms the sequence is effective, because it explains Tennessee’s past and reveals her children’s backgrounds, but these stories of children passed on or given away slot together too comfortably for emotional truth.

Being watched in an important theme in Run. Tennessee has spent long years more or less stalking her adopted sons. Doyle is intensely conscious of how he is seen as a former politician, and the impact of his family’s earlier involvement in a scandal reminiscent of the Chappaquiddick incident that cost Senator Teddy Kennedy his chance of the presidency.

The Doyles are people who live in the public gaze, even though Bernard Doyle’s years of power are long gone. They expect to be invited to receptions, and Teddy is comfortable enough in public to recite a speech by Jesse Jackson at a meeting where Jackson is actually the speaker, and not care if heads turn. Kenya and her mother, by contrast, have to live “like mice”, negotiating their way through a tough and exigent world.

But in the end Kenya has no need of the Doyles, as Patchett makes clear in her characterisation of this young girl. Kenya’s gifts would lift her out of poverty, without their intervention.

She is made to be watched. In her heart she knows that the docility she has learnt as a survival strategy is not real. “She was not such a very nice girl. Nobody who was very, very nice would ever work this hard to take something they wanted only for themselves.”

It’s a welcome touch of acid: novelists, like runners, should never be very, very nice.

RUN by Ann Pratchett

Bloomsbury, £14.99; 295pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £13.49 (free p&p)

Ann Patchett is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday August 26 at 3.30pm. Call 0845 373 5888 www.edbookfest.co.uk

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