Brilliantly exploring the emotional intricacies of a young marriage, Charles Baxter's latest novel, Saul and Patsy, uncannily exposes the least flattering side of human desire while celebrating the inexplicable power that love has over our lives.

Saul's decision to uproot himself and his wife Patsy from their meaningless lives in Chicago leads them to rural Five Oaks, Mich. Fed up with corporate cynicism, he believes teaching high school will bring greater satisfaction and chip away at the evils that have overtaken modern society.

Yet the tribal mentality of the town soon punctures Saul's pastoral idealism, as almost everyone they meet weirdly comments on Saul's Jewish identity. A widowed neighbor, Mrs. O'Neill, invites them over for cookies and curiously asks Patsy, "Does Saul eat cookies? Or is that against his religion?"

Such odd overtures of friendship only increase Saul's tendency to over-analyze any exchange. Yet the absurdity of the comments - did they really say that? - is not lost on him either.

With characteristic irony, the novel makes clear that Saul has long defined himself as complex and complicated: "As a personality, Saul had once prided himself on being interesting, almost Byzantine, a challenge to any therapist."

Yet the challenges that make for interesting therapy do not play well in a small town in which graduating from high school is considered overachieving. Even his students begin to harass him, and one aloof young man becomes strangely fascinated with Saul and his family, which leads to the mysterious tragedy at the novel's center.

To his credit, Baxter avoids giving us a straightforward and predictable social critique. Saul is not just a paranoid victim of creepy anti-Semitism. He also idolizes the very life that has created such a homogenous and insular town.

One night, driving home drunk from a party, Patsy and Saul wreck their car in a ditch. Looking for help, they stumble onto the home of Emory McPhee, a former student of Saul's who dropped out of high school to work, get married and raise a family.

With Saul drunk in his living room in the middle of the night and his respectability compromised, Emory lashes out at Saul, defending his happiness and moral sense of purpose in life. His comments prey on Saul, who fears happiness has somehow eluded him:

"Prior to his accident and his meeting with Emory McPhee, Saul had managed to forget about happiness, a state that had once bothered him for its general inaccessibility. Now he believed that, compared to others, he was, except for his marriage, actually and truly unhappy, especially since his mind insisted on thinking about the problem, poring over it, ragging him on and on . . . This was like Schopenhauer arriving at the door with a big suitcase, settling down for a long stay in the brain."

Saul's obsession with the McPhees leads him to his own creepy behavior. Spying on them, he yearns to know what their secret to happiness is.

Of course, there is no secret. Saul eventually learns that in spite of their insistence on how great life is, as a permanent state, happiness eludes them, as well.

Even so, this is not a depressing novel but an oddly uplifting one. Struggling to lead meaningful lives, Baxter's characters hold out for something larger than themselves, even as the novel gently laughs at their desires.

Much of the novel is told from Saul's point of view. But other characters also shine. Saul's wife, Patsy, is by far the most compelling and mysterious of them all.

Although Saul discusses his passion for his wife ad nauseam, she suggests her love in a more indirect and subtle way. Not exactly certain why she loves him, Patsy accepts this inexplicable force in her life with profound straightforwardness.

As she wakes up one morning, she thinks, "She might have loved anybody, but it had turned out to be this man, this Saul, a Scrabble player, a teacher. But there was no certainty of logic to it. He lay there now, the father of her daughter, his eyebrow twitching, his breath smelling of corn tassels. A man sleeping in bed in the morning is rarely a prize, it seemed to her in such moments. But she loved him, and her love puzzled her, as if Eros had played a prank on her and she wanted to unravel it."

For readers who enjoyed the critical edge of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Saul and Patsy offers a similar pleasure, but it treats its subject much more kindly.

Full of humor and skepticism, Saul and Patsy is not afraid to demystify sacred American institutions. But its ultimate success lies in its insistence that gaining such clarity leads to an even richer sense of life and its possibilities.

Geoffrey Bateman is a graduate student who teaches literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is also the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military.