Never let it be said that novelist David Leavitt is a one-trick pony.

Just when you think you've got him pegged - as chronicler of the alternative family in The Lost Language of Cranes, or the gay aesthetic in The Page Turner or The Marble Quilt - he manages to surprise you with something different and, often, equally adept.

The common thread of his stories is the search for love - or at least for acceptance - regardless of narrative bent. And so it continues in The Body of Jonah Boyd, in which the author plays it straight, literally.

His protagonist/narrator is a frumpy secretary in the psychology department of a small California college. Yet even as she haunts the sidelines of life, Judith "Denny" Denham becomes a lover, personal assistant and confidant to members of the Wright family.

To her boss - department chair Professor Ernest Wright - she is both proofreader of manuscripts and a secret paramour. To his wife, Nancy, she is someone to confide in and partner at the piano. Daughter Daphne views her as an older sister, while pensive youngest son Ben sees her as a rival for his parents' affection.

Only eldest son Mark seems immune to Denny's charms. That's because the year is 1969 and he's fled to Canada to avoid the draft.

The conflict arrives in the form of the title character, a suave, charming poet who is married to Anne, Nancy's best friend from back east. For years Nancy compares poor Denny unfavorably to the saintly Anne, who arrives one Thanksgiving with her husband in tow and proves a bitchy drunk, one step shy of a nervous breakdown.

Jonah Boyd is something else. His prowess as a poet/novelist captivates young Ben, who is entranced by Boyd's eccentricities. For one thing, he can only write longhand in special journals ordered from Italy. For another, he keeps losing them.

When he misplaces these journals over Thanksgiving - never to find them - the course of his life, Anne's and nearly everyone else's is altered. Only Denny remains the detached observer who, decades later, pieces together exactly when things went wrong.

A half dozen lives over 30 years impacted by a single weekend - it's a lot of ground to cover, especially for a book that clocks in at less than 220 pages. In fact, The Body of Jonah Boyd suffers not from a lack of imagination so much as from a lack of heft.

The Wrights are borderline cliché, Jonah Boyd is an enigma and Denny may be the most frustrating heroine Leavitt has ever created. It's one thing to let your main character pour out her dreams, and quite another to do so in a way that's bereft of passion. Save for her timidly rendered affair with Ernest, Denny Denham is a bit of a bore.

Which makes for a book that will leave readers conflicted. Leavitt has a way with words; he can turn a phrase with the best of them. And give him props for covering a lot of ground in short order. The Vietnam War, campus and marital politics, jealousies and muses in art - it's all there.

Yet Leavitt's most sympathetic character is also his most tragic, and the narrator's regard for Jonah Boyd is just shy of antiseptic.

It's not the length of a novel that satisfies our hunger, but its ability to make us care about its characters. By that measure, The Body of Jonah Boyd is like the diet plate at a diner: lean and filling, but short on flavor.

Mike Pearson is features editor. pearsonm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2592