Like Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s just-published “Lake Effect,” bestselling writer Tom Perrotta’s “Ghost Town” is about life in the suburbs in the 1970s.

Sweeney’s book was set near Rochester, New York, but Perrotta’s is southeast of there in New Jersey. Both books deal with young people who are adrift, and both capture a time of rapidly changing mores and politics (on the other hand: is there such a thing as a time when things aren’t changing nonstop, anymore?).

Perrotta has built up legions of fans with concept-forward, simple-to-encapsulate books such as “Election,” “Little Children,” “Mrs. Fletcher” and “The Leftovers” (the first two were made into movies, the latter two became HBO series). “Ghost Town” isn’t as easy to summarize and might not have what it takes for HBO because it’s about a concept, rather than a situation, and that concept is grief.

High school student Jimmy Perrini is lost as the book opens. His mom has died of cancer and his older sister and father are too shattered to be helpful, so he drifts into a hazardous friendship with a miscreant, an unpaid gig with a youth sports organization and an ill-defined possible romance with a girl from the organization who, like Jimmy, does not think she belongs in their cookie-cutter suburb.

Readers of Perrotta’s previous books may be surprised to find that not a lot happens in “Ghost Town.” His other books had high school corruption, doomed romance or the rapture at their centers, but “Ghost Town” is mostly a character portrait. As if he feels self-conscious about the lack of narrative momentum, Perrotta sprinkles ominous notes throughout the novel, hinting that if Jimmy had made different decisions, a tragedy could have been avoided. But what does happen feels fairly incidental to “Ghost Town,” other than providing a reason for Jimmy to return to his hometown, decades later, for a ceremony honoring his now-deceased father.

What “Ghost Town” shares with Perrotta’s other books is its insight into how character dictates action and, specifically, how a few seemingly small choices can affect the rest of a person’s life. From the beginning of the book, we know Jimmy will survive and even thrive — some details of his career mirror Perrotta’s — but we also know that he’s never stopped being shaped by the things that happened during the summer of “Ghost Town.”

As the older Jimmy observes about his work as a writer, “The truth is, it’s all been one thing, just a bunch of variations on the only themes that have ever mattered to me. Ghosts and Orphans. Orphans and Ghosts. The ways we’re abandoned and never left alone.”

Those are universal sentiments and they underscore why the brisk, resonant “Ghost Town” might be Perrotta’s best book. I’ve enjoyed all of his novels, but it feels like he has pared this one down to its essence, which is beautiful and true: how we stay connected to the people we’ve lost and how we learn to move on.

Ghost Town

By:Tom Perrotta.

Publisher: Scribner, 271 pages.

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