Annunciation.

To start with, there is much about David Plante's writing to admire: his terse yet evocative prose, the precision of his details, his willingness to use language to express states of mind that for most writers remain unexpressed for lack of skill. Plante needs his considerable gifts to fulfill a deeply serious intention, an apparently compelling desire to illuminate not the darkest regions of the human heart--a writer can do that in clear, sweeping prose--but rather, the dimmer regions, the areas that have clouded over, grown murky, lost their clarity. The regions we hardly notice, much less feel acutely, because we have lived with them for so long. Among Plante's subjects: the loss of religious faith in an already irreligious world, the primacy of physical beauty in human life, the struggle of the human will to do what is "right," that pesky urge to yield to violence or despair.

In his most recent novel, Annunciation, Plante reveals his stylistic mastery immediately. The title alone signals Plante's intention to set the reader's mind at work. Will this "annunciation" have any relation to "the Annunciation," known to at least some of his readers as the moment in which the Virgin Mary accepts her role in a divine mystery by responding, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord"? The title resonates with meaning as the reader encounters the first chapter, all eight words of it. "A glass of water in a dark room--" Just a suspended image. Not even a sentence. Chapter 2 is where the sentences begin, where they appear to tell a relatively conventional story of two lovers spending a weekend in the British countryside.

But Plante's two opening narrative moves--evocative title and mysteriously visual first chapter--reveal his need for a somewhat conspicuous artfulness, his need to show the reader the novelist's shaping hand at work. Before the novel is handed over to its characters, Plante's omniscient presence is deftly and memorably announced. By the time the characters are set in motion the reader knows that one relatively common novelistic convention--that the novel offers up a slice of real life as lived by real people who have simply been caught in the act of living--has been slightly skewed.

It is difficult to maintain the illusion assumed by such a convention when a novelist wants the reader to notice him, or the structure of his book, first. It is similarly difficult to shake the notion that the characters are inventions, perhaps realistic ones or inspired ones, but nonetheless quite simply products of the controlling consciousness of the novelist. Finally, it is easy to suspect that the people in chapter 2 are there primarily because the novelist needs them to tell his story, reveal his beliefs, advance his plot, in the same way he may have needed to employ a haunting visual image in chapter 1. In short, it is tricky to write a novel that seeks to become both a work of art and a slice of life, a novel which seeks to draw attention to its own composition, while leaving room for fully imagined characters to go about the business of living as if their existence lies beyond the language which composes their lives.

Plante's characters are intriguing people. Claire, an American, is the forty-year-old widow of a suicide, the mother of despondent, sixteen-year-old Rachel, and the lover of sensible George. An art historian who lives in London, Claire is drawn to the work of a painter of the late Baroque period, Pietro Testa, one of whose canvases, The Annunciation, cannot be located. Claude is a young editor for an art publisher in New York. He floats on the surface of his life, occasionally plunging below to a world of detached yet obsessive sex. He tries to find within himself the will to reach out to a suicidal cousin. He fails; she dies. He too goes to London, where he meets Claire.

What Claire and Claude share with one another, and clearly with the novelist, is an astonishing visual acuity, an extreme sensitivity to their precise location in physical space. This sensitivity allows them to reckon their state of well-being. Usually they both find themselves adrift, detached, in disarray. They are watchers, readers of signs, yet ultimately stranded within their bodies, unable to make any gesture large enough to rearrange the scene around them. And they are both fascinated by the darkness that surrounds bright objects.

Ultimately, the darkness that lures them both is the darkness surrounding Rachel, Claire's daughter. She is growing great with child. The circumstances of her impregnation are horrifying, and this horror haunts Claire. It also haunts the novel in an almost surreal fashion, even as it provides the plot with its artistic resonance. Rachel's radiant but insistently tragic presence provides the focus for Plante's cleverness, as the story he is telling begins to resemble other stories, and his troupe of characters trudges through Moscow in search of Testa's lost canvas and its message of grace and acceptance.

The problem with Plante's cleverness is that it is premised on an oversight. In order for his plot to work as planned, Rachel's pregnancy must be perceived as unremittingly tragic. She must emanate despair. The people she meets must pity her. And, in any novel, certainly some of the characters might do so. But unwed pregnancy is not simply a convenient symbol of social castigation. For in real life, pregnancy has little to do with art and everything to do with living.

What Plante refuses to show his readers, perhaps because he cannot see it himself, is that pregnancy is never just a static reflection of the conditions of conception; pregnancy is always about one person living inside another. And some people, even some characters in his novel, will see Rachel and be, at moments, delighted, not in spite of her pregnancy, but because the thought of a new baby can be delightful. Such people, characters and readers alike, will forget to be horrified. They will forget that Rachel's pregnancy is simply illustrative. They will require a plot that probes more deeply the true relationship between Claire and Rachel. A plot that has the honesty to admit that if its central characters are a mother and daughter then the novel is at least in part about motherhood. A plot that decides to show why Claire is so despairing, so unable to comfort her daughter or to dream of the grandchild her daughter has chosen to bear.

Annunciation closes where it opens, as a work of art firmly rooted in metaphysical and artistic ground. The parenthesis of the first chapter finds its mate here. Claude is reflecting on his inability to believe in God, although he can imagine him. "I imagine him as the darkness in which images occur .... That vast dark space behind the image of a sunlit glass of water is the only way I can imagine God."

This is a neat and visually pleasing ending. The sun has begun to illuminate the glass of water, and God can be imagined. But what about Claude and the rest of the characters? Isn't such neatness, even placed in Claude's mouth, simply a distraction from their own vibrant story? Belief or disbelief in God may make anyone's life more or less bearable. But no one can write a great novel without a profound belief in people, in the range of their longings and enthusiasms and cruelties. When a novelist refuses to recognize the full and wild life within his own characters, refuses to locate his own compassion, it follows that he cannot imagine us, his readers, in our own variety, and the reasons we might turn to him and his work to enlarge our visions, move our minds.