As a plane awaits permission from air traffic control to land, it will trace a certain path in the sky — a period in suspension called a “holding pattern.” Jenny Xie’s debut novel, also called “Holding Pattern,” unfurls a similar period of in-between, with the protagonist Kathleen Cheng back in her childhood home in Oakland, Calif. Here she’s stagnant — fresh off a crushing breakup and preparing for her mother’s upcoming wedding, unsure if she wants to continue her graduate program back in Baltimore but not certain where else she’d want to land.

She comes across an ad one day to become a professional cuddler at a cuddling start-up. Kathleen, whose graduate research is in haptics and touch, signs up first out of irony and then curiosity. Once she becomes a cuddler, each chapter in the book begins with a chipper instruction on cuddle positions: how to do the “Cuddle Puddle,” how to transition into the “Back to Back” when you need a breather or why you might want to try the “Half Spoon.” What follows is a study of various kinds of intimacy as she becomes fluent in the patterns of holding another person.

Xie, one of this year’s “5 Under 35” National Book Award honorees (and no relation to the poet of the same name), writes about these interactions viscerally and with warmth. The cuddle test administrator whom Kathleen first meets with had “poured herself against my body like wax hewing to a mold,” Kathleen says. Kathleen moves from laughing discomfort to horror and labored breathing, until “it felt like a meditation, a color dawning inside my head.” Her mind drifts to sounds and memories, and finally lands seamlessly into the administrator’s groove.

Xie explores how touch, however naturally or artificially created, can elicit closeness. When Kathleen meets a friend’s pet rat, she thinks of how researchers stroke lab rats with wet paintbrushes to mimic a mother’s tongue, because rat pups suffer developmentally if deprived of touch; as she haunts her ex-boyfriend’s social media, she thinks about how people connect online, through “asynchronous finger taps on screens we caressed to life dozens of times a day.” And as she gets closer to one particular cuddling client, she’s forced to confront how much of their shared comfort is a mirage — in a room where cuddling is commodified, how do you distinguish warm arm-cocooning, good conversation and soft finger traces from actual connection or intimacy? As Kathleen tries to be close — to her clients, her mother, herself — what unspools is often so tender that it hurts. But hope threads us back, encourages us to understand the intricacies of this life, and then to try again.