“The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” falls into that growing tradition of books that hover somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories — an unintended effect, perhaps, of the workshop setting that so many writers pass through nowadays. Like the chapters in Kevin Powers’s Iraq war novel “The Yellow Birds,” sections of Mathis’s book cry out for anthologizing, but their effect grows richer and more complex as they accrue.

The first chapter, set in 1925, is a fever dream of parental panic, a tale about the death of infant twins that suggests “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” will be the kind of overwrought maternal tragedy that Winfrey is too often unfairly charged with favoring. In fact, Mathis has something more subtle in store. The next chapter picks up two decades later, and each subsequent chapter jumps ahead a few years, rotating through the lives of Hattie Shepherd’s many children — “the twelve tribes.”

Among the wonders of Mathis’s storytelling is her ability to orient us gracefully in each of these new settings. Some of Hattie’s children have wandered far, others have remained under her care, but none can escape the infection of her anger, her incurable resentment at her husband, “the greatest mistake of her life,” who subjects her to “these endless pregnancies.”

The first adult child we meet is 22-year-old Floyd, an itinerant trumpet player who has his pick of fans after every gig. The subject of this moving story is all its own, but Mathis quickly establishes themes that run throughout the remaining chapters. Despite his promiscuous treatment of women, what really troubles Floyd is his attraction to other men. Twenty years before Stonewall, this young musician has no way to comprehend himself except in the tropes laid down by his family’s church — as an abomination, a Judas. Far from home, Floyd feels “like a kite broken off from its string.” His increasingly reckless desire is “a thing too awful to be tolerated.” Denying his affections, “Floyd smelled his cowardice; he was all rot inside.”

While a violently homophobic culture exacerbates Floyd’s self-loathing, that desperate sense of inadequacy is the horrible legacy Hattie has left to all the children she raised with such ferocious single-mindedness. They yearn to be normal, settled, respectable — to grasp the prize that has eluded their mother. Healthy or sick, successful or impoverished, none of them ever feel the balm of her love. Even her glad-handing husband thinks, “If she would stop hating him for one day, one hour, he’d have the strength to do the right thing by her.”