by JULIET WATERS

At one point in The Missing Person, Lynn Fleming reflects on the people she missed while studying in New York, far from her home of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There’s her recently deceased father, her fanatical unpredictable brother and even her over-controlling mother. “Missing people all around,” she muses.

The Missing Person, as its title implies, is a mystery—sort of. Lynn has returned to help find her brother, Wylie, who has joined a group of determined eco-activists. It turns out that Wylie is more uncommunicative than missing, much to his mother’s frustration. But once home, Lynn discovers other intrigues. There’s a mystery artist who might turn out to be a good subject for her virtually abandoned art history dissertation. And there’s a mysterious smell “not unpleasant, but vaguely acrid, layered, and chemical.” This, it turns out, is the smell of a sexy, Brooklyn-born plumber who lures Lynn into an eco-terrorist prank that will leave her feeling like the Patty Hearst of contemporary environmentalism.

It’s a plot that keeps the pages turning, but the novel is as much about homesickness. Over coffee at Reservoir, Ohlin, a Montreal native who now lives in the U.S., ruminates: “She’s a character who feels that her real home is far away from her. I’m not sure if I feel that way about Montreal. I do often feel homesick and very attached to places when I’m not there. But it’s true that your sense of self is really defined by your home. I think that’s truer now than it used to be. These days, people do leave their homes, they go all over the place, they visit their families every once in a while and they don’t all live in the same village. I think that does create a very strong sense of disconnection and confusion, because it is so important to be rooted.”

Ohlin is obviously still rooted here, returning regularly to visit a mother who lives in the West Island and a father who lives in the Plateau. But by now she’s probably spent as many years away—years spent studying at Harvard, moving to New York, then New Mexico for stints as a starving writer, then the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Currently she lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches writing at Lafayette College. Over these years, she’s amassed an impressive list of awards, publications, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2005.

Despite all this life experience, Ohlin, who by my math is in her early 30s, still looks like she probably never gets served a drink in Easton without her ID. Small, pretty and a little shy, it’s hard to imagine her hanging out with a gang of eco-warriors. But the characters ring true.

“I met a lot of people who were equally passionate but more sensible,” she says. “It’s such a raging debate because the water crisis is so intense out there and it’s just an exaggerated version of a crisis that every other place is going to have... I invented the things that they did, but not the passion.”

As for the future, maybe she’ll return to this city, and maybe she won’t—in real life and in fiction. “I aspire one day to write a book set in Montreal. It’s a really complex place with this tremendous political history, but I think it would be incredibly hard to write about... When I first started I wrote a lot of stories that were set where I grew up, in the West Island, and people in my classes would be reading them and they would go, “What’s a Depanneur?” So I ended up making it a kind of generic suburbia, which really doesn’t do it justice. So it is something I still struggle with; how you can capture a place that’s so complex and unique? I don’t know if I’ll ever do it.”

The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin. Knopf, hc, 292pp, $32.95