After all the verbal high jinks in the past month from Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, the clear, transparent storytelling of T.C. Boyle’s new novel sounds positively retro: no 12-page-long sentences, no stream-of-consciousness mingled with menu items and IM chats. Just a well-told tale. “It’s something I’ve never done before,” Boyle told the Wall Street Journal. “A straight historical narrative . . . without irony, without comedy. . . . Just to see if I can do it.”

He can. But that’s not surprising. The­atrical as he appears in those outrageous shirts and jackets, in his fiction Boyle never steals the ­spotlight from his characters, from what they’re wrestling with. His pre­vious novel, “When the Killing’s Done” (2011) , took place on the Channel Islands off the coast of California and managed to make the complex issue of environmental reclamation tremendously exciting. His new novel, “San Miguel,” is a kind of prequel that again takes place on one of the Channel Islands, but the story’s tone and pace are entirely different. Instead of violently dramatizing a contemporary debate, “San Miguel” is an absorbing work of historical fiction based on the lives of two real families who resided on San Miguel Island in the 19th and 20th centuries.

All life is a struggle against entropy, but the people in this novel are acutely aware of the encroaching decay, internal and external. “She was coughing,” the story opens, “always coughing, and sometimes she coughed up blood.” That’s Marantha Waters, who has just sailed to San Miguel for “the virginal air” that will make her well again. A ridiculous proposition, of course, but her new husband, Will, is so excited about raising 4,000 sheep on this remote and treeless rock that everyone’s pretending things will work out fine.

Using their last $10,000, they’ve brought their teenage daughter, Edith, and a serving girl named Ida to “the Graveyard of the ­Pacific.” Marantha knows that their house — the only structure on the 14-square-mile ­island — won’t be anything special, but she’s shocked to find a sheep-scented shack: “everything damp, always damp, mold creeping over the mattress like a wet licking tongue and the walls beaded with condensation” — just the first of many bitter disappointments Marantha will endure over the coming months as her lungs noisily rot.

Early one dark evening when young Edith alludes to “Wuthering Heights,” she and Ida laugh, but the spores of gothic tragedy are already lodged in this house. As the days fall away “like the skin of a rotten fruit,” Boyle carefully records the strained breath of a dying woman trying to combat the twin infections of tuberculous and resentment, determined to support her husband in a plan that cannot work. “She didn’t want to spoil things for Will,” Boyle writes. “This was his idea, his venture, his dream, and he’d talked it up so many times over the past months it had become a litany of success and increase and health abounding.” But deep within herself, deeper even than the mycobacteria she can’t cough away, she has lost the habit of hope.