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Cheating’s redemptive, and there goes the tree-lined neighborhood. These two notions help drive Susan Kelly’s new novel. One is an act, and the other a metaphor. The metaphor of tree destruction covers a lot of ground. It encompasses paralyzing grief and small and large betrayals as it saws through a subdivision.

Kelly lives in Greensboro, and the novel is set in Greensboro. The setting though is middle-class, white Southern ambience. It’s not a place you drive by like, say, the Biff Burger on Lee Street. But you can sense it. The ambience is a place, too. It’s an emotional space where people, in this case fictional characters, do what they do.

In basketball season, if you watch but one game on TV, you’ll hear an overpaid courtside commentator describe one of the centers as a big man with a soft touch. As much as I hate to borrow from one of those suits with a mouth, the description applies to this novel, “By Accident” (New York: Pegasus Books; 2010, 304 pages, hardcover $24).

It handles big topics with a soft touch. Not frivolously. Not superficially. Restraint graces this fiction. Sentences dance until they reach their periods. I don’t think there’s a misstep in all 304 pages. It’s emotionally in check, never over the top.

This is Kelly’s fifth novel. Even before I finished it, I began to wonder about all those writers who live in Hillsborough. How is it possible that most are better known than she is? Then I remembered. This is not a just world.

Here’s a nice example of the middle-class ambience she creates. The narrator is at a party at a house under construction:

I’d lost social navigation skills; had forgotten the feints and back-and-forths of the social fray, the jabs and sexual innuendoes.

“Guess this is the closest I’ll ever get again to a pair of studs,” Sally Grainger joked. She was standing in the framework, a lumber jail, whose crosspieces bore flickering votive candles.

“What’s it like being an empty-nester?” Maria Davidson asked Tim Holland. “Is it so much fun? Do you and Carrie run around with no clothes on all the time?”

“All the time,” Tim repeated. “We had to get dressed just to come over here.”

The main character in “By Accident” is a mother in her early 40s. She is numb with grief. She has withdrawn into herself, closed the door and turned off the light. Her teenage son, just graduated from boarding school, has been killed in a traffic accident. “He had just memorized his social security number for college…” She spends her days looking out windows.

You learn that she’s been unable to function for months and months. It takes a toll on her young daughter and husband. But when a new neighbor moves in next door, her light comes on and the door opens, all at the proper pace, of course. He’s 28; she’s 41.

But it doesn’t last long. Betrayal follows betrayal. It’s as if a big storm topples one tree and a chain reaction of falling trees begins. Then, chain saw wielding work men show up to take out the rest, denuding the neighborhood. Something like this happens. It’s a nice metaphor, all splintery, like the stumps of this family.

I wondered though how anybody could survive such a year as this character endured. You’d need to eat Prozac and Valium like popcorn. It was shattering; something falls on her head each time she gets a breather. But this character steps fairly agilely through the debris once she’s righted herself. Well, she’s a mother, and they’re tough. This one’s cast iron.

More bothersome is the final chapter. The narrator, let’s call her Laura like the author does, steps out of time. The tone shifts ever so slightly. She summarizes what has happened since her marriage fell apart. Kelly, I think, should have resisted that impulse. The novel ends too tidily. Life is messy.