Across multiple novels and acclaimed plays — including a much-hyped musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s YA classic “The Outsiders,” which opens on Broadway this spring — Adam Rapp has focused on troubled biological and found families. In his new novel, “Wolf at the Table,” the dysfunction is allegorical: The scope and tone of “Wolf” suggest that emotional repression is America’s most reliable trait. Its cousin, violence, is a close second.

Early in this grim, engrossing new novel, we get to know Alec, a ne’er-do-well young man from New York state. He’s just been fired from his job at an orchard not long after getting kicked out of his house for stealing from his church. It’s 1964 and he has no marketable skills to speak of, but a fellow drifter he meets offers a suggestion. “Try the Midwest,” he says. “People are nice there.”

What follows is a pointed retort to that stereotype. In his Midwest, cruelty reigns. Alec arrives in the Chicago area in 1973 and soon has a brush with infamous mass killer John Wayne Gacy. In 1966, his sister Myra had a run-in of her own with Richard Speck, who killed eight nursing students. As the story moves into the 21st century, Myra and Alec take divergent paths from their shared experience with evil — altruism for Myra, sociopathy for Alec. But the siblings never quite lose their connection, braided symbols of hope and despair.

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It’s a brash, widescreen achievement. “Wolf” joins a fine (if fading) tradition of robust American family sagas mastered by Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley and — especially — Joyce Carol Oates, the baroness of bad news in Rust Belt burgs. And much like those writers, Rapp at first seems to be crafting a provocative but intimate domestic yarn. When we meet the Larkin clan in 1951 Elmira, N.Y, the place is suffused with a Cleaver-esque glow of exurban charm. Alec is an altar boy, while Myra is a bookish girl (she’s enchanted by “The Catcher in the Rye”) who has a sweet-natured run-in with Yankees rookie Mickey Mantle. They and their siblings — prim-and-proper Lexy, intellectually challenged Joan, artsy rebel Fiona — are minded by a severely Catholic mother and a pipe-smoking dad.

Of course, there’s rot in the rafters. Dad, a war vet, is suppressing undiagnosed PTSD, while Mom’s rigid religious fervor clouds her awareness of the crises her children face. Rapp is deft at slowly introducing the horrors that eventually consume this family. One moment, Alec is making an earnest attempt to get his life in order; the next, he’s an accessory to a murder where “an arc of blood sprays onto a Virgin Mary statue dressed with many colorful beaded necklaces.” He communicates his contempt for Mom’s neglect by sending her packages designed to stoke offense and fear.

Rapp suggests that the Larkins’ suppression is a national contagion: We’re remarkably talented at acknowledging the horrors in our midst while refusing to do much about them. “The invasion of Cambodia, Richard Nixon, the Beatles breaking up, famine, the assassination of MLK,” Fiona says in a letter to Myra in 1970. “How could a just and thoughtful God allow this kind of stuff to go on? What is there to believe in anymore?”

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But, Rapp wants to know, how much can we do? The things God allows to happen won’t go away, after all — indeed, Rapp argues that it’s in our genes. In the Larkin home, psychic damage, if not outright psychosis, is passed on across generations. Dad’s PTSD re-emerges as Alec’s sociopathy; Myra’s husband’s schizophrenia is passed on, in terrifying form, to her son, Ronan, whose rising talent as a playwright is undermined by his psychotic delusions. Good things in the Larkins’ universe tend to become tainted. “The Catcher in the Rye” goes from Myra’s beloved tale of youthful liberation to a stolen collectible. Mickey Mantle’s all-American good manners are undermined by an expensive Mantle rookie card that Alec uses as a grim bargaining chip.

“Wolf” isn’t explicitly political, but the book’s themes are attuned to a time when our social fractures seem persistent and irreparable. In a telling moment, a mentor of Ronan’s summarizes how the London press will respond to his new play: “They’ll see your doomed characters as victims of the American class system and applaud your blistering critique of a government that forgets its veterans and lost daughters.” He could be talking about “Wolf,” which is also chasing after big statements. Still, Rapp’s take is more nuanced. Myra is good-hearted but never simple — she carries too much baggage as a wife, mother and nurse. Alec is vile, tormenting family members up close and from a distance. But he’s not a one-note monster, and his horrors compel our attention — the novel is strongest when he’s on the stage. If we could figure him out, Rapp suggests, we might figure out other horrors besides.

The root of Alec’s evil is familiar, but the despair under that cruelty is richly imagined: “We’re all just doomed to be what we are,” he manically fumes to himself. “Wolf at the Table” ends tragically, with plenty of doom for everybody. But it also suggests that everybody is on a moral spectrum, searching for some kind of goodness. It’s a novel unromantically but diligently looking for hope — some good luck — in a broken home and a broken nation.

Mark Athitakisis a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”

Wolf at the Table

By Adam Rapp

Little, Brown. 480 pp. $27

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