We don’t see each other clearly, no matter how close we get, no matter how seemingly intimate we are. Sometimes, in the most egregious cases, that’s because we’re standing in our own way.

Even hindsight is little help to Tom Stone, the 40-something Londoner who unspools the narrative of Emily Perkins’s poignant, unsettling, and darkly funny “Novel About My Wife” (Bloomsbury USA, 271 pages, $14.99). Ostensibly, the story he tells is about his wife, Ann, who’s died, though we don’t know how.

“If I could build her again using words, I would,” he says at the start, and who wouldn’t believe that remembering Ann, reconstructing her, is exactly what he is going to do? Ostensibly, the novel within the novel is also about her, his way of getting inside Ann’s head, imagining the things he cannot know for sure. But somehow, his gaze always focuses most clearly on himself, his myopia necessarily occluding our vision as well.

As his recollection begins, Ann is 38, gorgeous, and pregnant with their first child. Tom, a floundering screenwriter, and Ann, an artist whose day job involves making plaster casts of cancer patients’ body parts, belong to that chunk of the creative class who are barely making enough money to cling to their crunchy, yuppie lifestyle, which they insist on regarding with contempt as a matter of pride.

“We would join the ranks of middle-class hopefuls attempting to create a master race in their own Ikea kitchens,” Tom predicts ironically, fretting about how parenthood might amp up their neuroses. “Could we become the wankers I’d read about in the Guardian that take their kids to Harley Street for cranial osteopathy? I shut my eyes. I would put nothing past us.”

Gentrifiers, Tom and Ann have just purchased a foreclosed house in scruffy East London, near some council flats, and it’s unclear to him whether this is a stop on their way up or the prelude to their plummet into the underclass. Fear of financial disaster consumes him as his writing prospects dry up, and the omnipresence of his own anxiety may be one reason he doesn’t realize that Ann’s ballooning fears, her bursts of manic energy, and her shutting down in other ways are not side effects of pregnancy, not evidence of hormonal rushes, but symptoms of mental illness.

“Don’t think I was analysing Ann’s interior telescoping in any way as it happened,” he explains, having at least a bit more insight in retrospect. “Why would I? We had our own house, we were in love, we were expecting a baby and this intoxicating surge of energy made us feel young. It was a golden time. Like all such times it didn’t last. I’m a moron, OK? I didn’t see it coming.”

He is kind of a moron, but you wouldn’t have noticed that at the time either. What’s notable about Tom and Ann, on the surface, is how normal they are: the almost familial vacations they take with their best friends, Tonia and Andy; the nasty jealousy Tom feels toward Simon, a wildly successful screenwriter whom Ann meets in an accident in the Underground; the friendship Ann swiftly forms with Kate, Simon’s flaky naturopath lover; Tom’s awareness, suddenly, of having entered middle age, a fact made obvious by the appalling youth of people in positions of responsibility. (“Bank tellers, travel agents, cops — puppies these days.”) Even their creeping financial desperation is fairly normal. Their sex life, it seems, tends to be better than normal.

But the hallucinations that happen when Tom isn’t around, the nonexistent ants streaming from the ceiling, driving Ann to scrub whole rooms down with ammonia; her persistent terror of the homeless man who she’s certain is stalking her; her frenzied, middle-of-the-night sculpting; her staying up all night and rearranging the furniture and the cabinets — these are not normal. Not that Tom notices enough to be alarmed.

“What must it feel like to have your body play host to an alien force?” he wonders, watching her body change with the pregnancy, still puzzling over the wrong alien force.

Toward the end, toward Ann’s final unraveling, the novel goes a bit fuzzy and vague, the shifts coming too suddenly, the emotional underpinnings buried someplace the reader can’t find them. And if Tom can’t ever get a grip on Ann, neither can we, which is an obstacle to the novel’s emotional power. “Tom,” she told him once, laughing. “You centralise yourself in everything.” Quite.