Reed Futrell is a blue-collar worker in the uranium-enrichment plant where his father was killed in a horrific chemical spill. Reed's sometimes girlfriend, Julia Jensen, is a biologist in a cytopathology lab who longs to study molecular biology.

Together, Reed and Julia share a fascination for string theory, subatomic particles and the solar system. But when rumors of a plutonium leak at the plant begin to spread, Reed dismisses them too handily for Julia's comfort and she pulls away, unable to understand Reed's loyalty to a company that killed his father and has endangered so many more.

Bobbie Ann Mason's new novel, An Atomic Romance, is a political novel of sorts, continually suggesting the futility of scientists' attempts to contain and dispose of atomic waste. But while Mason's concerns are certainly valid, her political agenda too often supersedes the humanness of her characters, making An Atomic Romance more an op-ed piece than the intelligent, insightful novel that it wants to be.

An Atomic Romance is Mason's first novel in a decade and, like such award-winning novels as In Country and Feather Crowns, Mason's newest book is written with a poetic grace that occasionally moves to a deeper place than mere politics. Consider, for example, the closing scene when Reed and Julia must tackle the emotion and enormity of their differences:

"Something about the scene was like the unreality of a movie ending, \[Reed] thought - the warm, phony wrap-up. He tried to stop himself from seeing through it, from having the cynical suspicion that the walk into the sunset was an unending descent into flames. For a mere speck in space-time, that warm moment that glowed was essential. If you could have one or two in your life, that might be enough, but you had to have at least one before you went cold."

Reed is an admirably complex character who visits his mother frequently at Sunnybank nursing home, where she is recovering from a stroke, and whose best friend Burl is a curious mix of Protestant religious fervor and alcoholism. But despite Reed's underlying complexities, Mason manages to hold us to a sense of immediacy that does not allow all of his disparate parts to join as one humanly inconsistent man.

Although he was married once before, we hear curiously little about Reed's ex-wife or his two grown children. Mostly Reed lives in the present: keeping tabs on the reported leaks at the plant; checking his e-mail for potential dates, including a rather robust woman whose sign-off name is Hot Mama; caring for his beloved dog Clarence; and reading the likes of Stephen Hawking and other heady scientific thinkers.

Ultimately, Reed spends much of the novel longing for and chasing after Julia, although their first encounter doesn't occur until nearly halfway through the book, and after that, Julia disappears again and won't return Reed's phone messages. And although it's sometimes irritating to continually watch Reed search for Julia, rather than interact with her, her absence allows us to see behind Reed's calm exterior.

Despite Julia's assumption that Reed's loyalty and naiveté prevent him from seeing the seriousness of the radioactive hot spots discovered in and around the plant, for example, Reed's thoughts reveal more complexity: "Surely, he thought, the scientists did not think of themselves as monsters. They were thinking of the safety of the atomic workers; they wanted to know what the body and the planet could tolerate; they wanted to find peaceful uses for their deadly discoveries; they offered the gift of nuclear medicine to the future. With enough good intentions, Reed thought, you could find yourself giving atomic cocktails to poor women or irradiating the testes of prisoners; you could inject a child's leg bone with purply, sticky, shape-shifting gel."

An Atomic Romance is one of those books that is frustratingly almost there. Mason is a clean and intelligent writer, and some of her past novels succeed in examining the effects of major political decisions without sidestepping into political treatise. An Atomic Romance, unfortunately, never manages to free itself from its own agenda long enough to let its more human side come to the forefront.

An Atomic Romance

• By Bobbie Ann Mason. Random House, 266 pages, $24.95.

• Grade: B-

Jennie A. Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, and other publications. She lives in Platteville.