GODDESS COMPLEX, by Sanjena Sathian

If you’re a woman in America and you don’t want children — and if you’re honest about this when people ask — then you might be excessively familiar with the common follow-up opinions, questions, warnings. You’ll change your mind. What does your partner think? You’re wrong. You’ll regret it; once you come to your senses, it could be too late.

Part of what can be striking about such rebuttals, over time, is how little they vary. It can feel as if the people claiming they know you better than you do are reciting lines from an immensely popular, age-old guide to life. Somehow, you’ve never read it: If you did, it probably still wouldn’t be for you. But how did so many people get their hands on this guide — and, in its absence, how sure can you be that you’re leading the right life for you?

This question and its attendant bewilderment drive Sanjena Sathian’s inventive second novel, “Goddess Complex.” Thirty-two-year-old Sanjana Satyananda is in a state of profound confusion: After aborting the fetus she didn’t want and leaving her baby-desiring husband back in India, she’s staying at her sister’s house in Connecticut while trying to figure out what to do next. Meanwhile, it seems that all of Sanjana’s friends are turning into parents, joining a “fellowship of mothers.” She feels left out, exiled: “Once, I, too, had made sense, but of late, I was becoming less defined. I seemed to have abdicated my birthright citizenship to the nation of marriage and mortgage and motherhood, and beyond its borders lay uncharted terrain.”

Sanjana might be less troubled by these phantom alternate selves — by all that she is not — if she felt more at home in how she has defined herself. Though she’s nominally pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale, her research in Bombay has gone awry, and she’s quit and then rejoined the program, doubting her faith in what used to be a vocation, a “monastic higher calling.”

“Goddess Complex” is astute about the repetitiveness of misery, and how pain can accrete like an enclosing wall, rising to block out the rest of the world. As Sanjana’s desperation builds, so do the grievances of those she loves. She masturbates to online real estate listings (“I set a minimum total price of $750,000”), and disrupts a friend’s baby shower by getting high and yelling the word “abortion.” Her sister kicks her out after she has sex with a 24-year-old in the backyard, captured on the security camera for Sanjana’s 7-year-old niece to see. (She even allowed the 24-year-old to urinate on her sister’s tomato garden, having heard that urine helps tomatoes grow.)

Sanjana envies her sister’s “comfortable” life, even as she is exhausted by the “extreme machinations” it requires to keep up. Instead of fulfilling the house-sitting duties her sister has assigned,

I just lurked, mourning the person I might have become had I chosen a different job, a different partner, a different pattern of behaviors over the past 32 years. I might own a house like this, or like the ones I jerked off to on Zillow. I might have been happy. I might not have been myself, but that would have been no real loss, as I did not particularly like being myself.

Before this perspective has a chance to feel stifling, “Goddess Complex” takes a sharp, unexpected turn as Sanjana flies to India, where she intends to finalize her divorce but ends up at a remote resort run by her doppelgänger, Sanjena, instead. It is here that Sanjana’s focus on her alternate lives turns literal, the novel swerving into a more frenzied chronicle involving elaborate deceptions, a cultish pregnancy influencer and a lot of blood. Startling behavioral twists become credible with the strength of characters’ longing for parenthood. As Sanjana faces an important decision about her own reproductive fate, the narrative lifts her out of the limits of what she’s imagined her life can be.

Haunting and hilarious, “Goddess Complex” is at once a satire, a Gothic tale, a novel of ideas, a character study. Like any individual life, the book bristles with possibilities.

GODDESS COMPLEX | By Sanjena Sathian | Penguin Press | 286 pp. | $29