Almost from its first page, Natalie Bakopoulos’ third novel, ARCHIPELAGO, brings to mind the work of writers like Rachel Cusk and Katie Kitamura. Unfortunately, this evocative but less than fully formed story of a middle-aged American expatriate writer and her passage through lovely parts of coastal Southern Europe suffers in that comparison.

The novel begins promisingly, when its unnamed narrator --- born in Detroit but living in Greece for several years --- steps onto a ferry transporting her to a two-week international arts center residency program for translators on an island off the Dalmatian coast. There, in addition to working on translating a novel entitled Occupation from Greek to English, she’ll be communing with fellow translators and attending various cultural events.

On that ride, she finds herself on the receiving end of a “provocative gesture” from a male fellow passenger and then is almost run over as she exits the vessel. Shortly after arriving at the arts center, she encounters Luka, a Croatian novelist and journalist she’s known for nearly 20 years and with whom she’s had a “comfortable familiarity,” one that “seemed to survive distance and time.” That makes it especially odd that he insists on calling her Natalia, not her name, but rather the title of his novel-in-progress.

"[Bakopoulos] possesses considerable descriptive skill, and in the strikingly beautiful part of the world in which the story is set...she’s blessed with a wealth of material that she translates into captivating prose."

The pair renew their intermittent acquaintance, one that includes a desultory romantic aspect that arises from a “recognition between us, a sense that we’d both entered some sort of transitory space, and that space was something collaborative, recombinant, transformative.” When Luka disappears, unannounced, on what he says is a “new assignment,” the narrator seizes the opportunity to embark in his car on a sort of odyssey (there are several allusions to that epic in the novel) back to her family home in Southern Greece that once was the residence of her paternal grandparents (she’s Greek on her father’s side, Ukrainian on her mother’s) and that she has informally inherited.

Throughout, Bakopoulos seems to blur the line between the narrator as a character in her story and perhaps one in Luka’s novel, leaving us guessing about whose story we’re actually experiencing. But where the narrator marvels at “how natural it felt to be this woman, to answer to this name,” and how Luka’s novel “seemed to narrate a translated version of me, where some version of myself, a different life, wound tightly with my own,” even as she admits that she “didn’t know what was what anymore: translation, novel, body, self,” that experience feels more confusing than engaging on the page.

However, it’s the static quality of the plot that ultimately undermines it. Though Bakopolous alludes to an earlier incident involving the disappearance of an American woman, for example, and a feeling of impending menace looms over the story from its opening pages, its failure to deliver on that promise is a fatal flaw. The encounter with the man on the ferry reminds one of Chekhov’s gun, but in this case, it’s a loaded weapon that doesn’t fire.

Fortunately, Bakopoulos is a skillful, at times almost poetic, writer, and that at least partially redeems the book. She possesses considerable descriptive skill, and in the strikingly beautiful part of the world in which the story is set --- one that features ancient towns, rugged landscapes and gorgeous coasts --- she’s blessed with a wealth of material that she translates into captivating prose. There are several scenes, for example, of the narrator swimming (one of her favorite pastimes), like this one:

“Nearby were sandy dunes and crystal lakes and a sea like a long marriage, spots of light and spots of dark and an expanse of depth and breadth; the scraggly coastal forest stretched out to it, like umbrellas sloping to the sea. From this vista the pines seemed to walk right into the water, where they became shadowy, dusky kelp, but of course it happened the other way around. The kelp forest lived as a land dweller while remaining rooted on that seafloor.”

But at every moment when the narrator’s story feels like it could take a dramatic turn, Bakopoulos fails to capitalize on that tension. The novel hints at big themes --- obsession, violence against women and the challenges of women’s lives in middle age, the subtle difficulties of literary translation, one’s identity with nation and culture, and more --- but only deals glancingly with any of them. ARCHIPELAGO unquestionably reflects Bakopoulos’ literary talent, but in the end, her reach for something that might be considered truly significant here exceeds her grasp.