The great modern South American novelists - among them Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Mex-ico's octogenarian Carlos Fuentes - are not renowned for being easy to read. If it's not their disjointed, experimental style that troubles the reader, it is their tough, politically charged storylines.

A sort of compendium of sketches of domestic life in modern Mexico, Happy Families (spot the irony ...) packs both those punches, and then some.

At times bewildering, at others harrowing, its 16 chapters (32 if you include the free-verse poetic interludes) gather together an assortment of familial relationships. But that loose connecting thread belies the novel's almost maddening diversity, and its reluctance to yield any obvious grand narrative. Even the individual stories can feel directionless, flickering tantalisingly before us and then expiring without seeming to say much at all.

A son and daughter try to make careers for themselves but end up returning to the bosom of the family home. Two childhood sweethearts meet again, by chance, decades later. A man betrays his beautiful wife for her ugly cousin. Three daughters hold an annual vigil for their deceased father.

Fuentes' stylistic high jinks further refract and scatter the pieces. Narrators are swapped about, voices change, sober realism melts into hazy solipsism in an instant. The text seems to slip constantly, almost infuriatingly, through our fingers. But some recurrent ideas start to seep out of the cracks, and they aren't cheerful. There is a creeping sense that all these relationships are marred by forms of violence and betrayal. That they often descend into ugly, destructive power struggles. And to this extent the novel is like a meditation on its epigraph, the well-known opening line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

But what makes this book doubly and triply beguiling, beyond the challenging storytelling and stylistics, is our feeling that Fuentes is trying, yet only implicity and subtly, to probe deeper into this malaise. The Tolstoy epigraph admits (and Fuentes shows) many kinds of unhappiness, but it doesn't rule out happiness altogether.

We eventually perceive, I think, that Fuentes is asking whether these kinds of suffering are endemic, or whether they are the tragic byproducts of modernity, engendered by such things as politics, religion, fame, poverty, ambition - all of which we encounter in the novel.

It is no surprise, of course, to realise that there is a socio- political undertone. Fuentes' novels are well known for it, and he is an active political commentator. But here, the underlying question is deeply buried. And the answer, if it's there at all, is buried even deeper.

Is it modern society that drives people to hurt each other? Or is it an ineluctable fact of humanity? They are questions for the reader to ponder.

This is an exacting literary journey. But there are, as always, magic and poetry in Fuentes' prose (not overlooking the very accomplished and natural translation of it by Edith Grossman) that make the journey worthwhile.

Happy Families by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Edith Grossman
Bloomsbury, £17.99; 352pp Buy the book here

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