The residents of Pinewood, N.C., the primarily African-American community at the heart of Lehigh University professor Stephanie Powell Watts’ debut novel “No One Is Coming to Save Us,” know what it is to have deferred dreams dry up like Langston Hughes’ raisins in the sun.

Twenty-five years ago, Pinewood’s furniture plants thrived, but now most have closed down leaving it little better than a ghost town. All the same, the book has a vibrant ensemble cast, starting with the plural first-person voice of the opening chapter. This is presumably a chorus of poor black folk — the “us” of the title — who pass comment on the town and its happenings. But the book truly belongs to middle-aged Sylvia, whose husband, Don, left her for a younger woman.

Sylvia’s regular phone calls with Marcus, a prisoner in the county jail, seem like an attempt to make up for her son Devon’s absence. Meanwhile, her daughter Ava, a bank loan officer in her late 30s, is desperately trying to get pregnant. Ava’s husband Henry is also having an affair, with a white waitress, and fathered her 5-year-old son.

There’s an obsession here with progeny and property as the two vital signs of success. Three generations of wronged women — including Sylvia’s mother Mabel, who once journeyed to South Carolina for a love potion to win back her cheating husband (alas, it didn’t work) — are connected by motherhood sought and lost.

Home ownership is the other key indicator of achievement for this community. Sylvia grew up in a shack with an outhouse, graduating to a trailer in the woods and then a coveted split-level house. “If she and Don had not had a life, they did have a house. That’s something,” the collective narrator wryly observes.

Despite the plural narrator’s often chatty informality, the novel is infused with haunting lines about the persistence of the past and the danger of hope. These aphorisms represent the accumulated wisdom of a town full of disappointed dreamers: “They were still young enough to believe in happy endings” and “If you can’t get what you want, want something else.”

JJ Ferguson, the book’s Jay Gatsby stand-in and a symbol of the region’s would-be gentrification, has been away from Pinewood for 15 years. A former foster child and Army veteran, he has come back to build a house of his own on Brushy Mountain Road. Just as he renovates properties for a living, he now wants a redo with Ava, his high school sweetheart.

Yet “you can’t go home again, right?” JJ asks Sylvia in a nod to Thomas Wolfe. Indeed, the storyline, although it veers toward soap opera melodrama in places and occasionally lingers on particular scenes for too long, still feels like a tribute to American literature’s greatest stories of dejected idealists.

“The Great Gatsby” might be the clearest touchpoint, but it’s oversimplifying to label this a “Gatsby” remake. There aren’t that many one-to-one correspondences with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters and incidents, and Sylvia, easily the most compelling character, falls outside the framework entirely.

Ms. Powell Watts won a 2012 Ernest J. Gaines Award for her story collection, “We Are Taking Only What We Need,” also set among struggling black families in her native North Carolina. With her first novel she solidifies her reputation as a chronicler of “the real country, not the tourist-rural.”

Her characters know that no deus ex machina is coming to put things to rights. It’s up to them to resist fate: “We can reinvent. We can survive. At least some of us think so. What choice do we have?”

Rebecca Foster is an American transplant to England and a freelance editor and writer.

First Published: April 9, 2017, 4:00 a.m.