Bob the Gambler.

Reading Frederick Barthelme, I often feel the way I do when I'm reading a slick magazine stuffed with glossy ads and just enough substance to cut through my guilt. After reading him, I've got sand in the bed: something's bothering me, something's keeping me awake, but the source is diffuse, irritating, hard to spot.

Barthelme's work has altered recently in small but significant ways. The stories I read in the New Yorker in the '70s and '80s often frustrated me precisely because of their trademark minimalisms: the jittery present tense, the flat prose, the name brands, the preoccupation with food, cars, and the surface of things. Unlike Raymond Carver, who was accused of being a minimalist himself, Barthelme was not writing about the working class and the tensions of not enough money. His New South characters (his territory is generally the Mississippi Gulf Coast) were more often than not privileged and educated, caught up in boredom and ennui. Barthelme, in his clever, mannered, ironic voice, clearly felt some sympathy for these people as he made, again and again, the fictional point that the rampant consumerism, the stuff in their lives, was clogging their very souls, but the early work often struck me as repetitive and overly conceptual. Ostensibly realistic, this fiction gave a tightly cropped view of the world. All Barthelme's characters - male and female, adult and teenager - sounded like one another, and they all sounded like the stories' narrators, bright and whimsical and given to wise-guy banter and neat closure.

Nevertheless, there's always been the sand in the bed, the sense that Barthelme was and is onto something important about contemporary life, that even in his fictional repetitions he is forcing his readers to look closely at how overwhelmed and isolated, how hungry for connection, Americans often feel. In recent years, Barthelme has let his sentences linger longer over physical details, and there's more a sense of place, especially of Biloxi, which has played such a big role in his work. The prose has become more musical. He has also paid attention to new subjects - just as you think he's blindered, writing about the South without ever mentioning race, you'll turn a page and find the subject raised; then as you wonder why none of his characters is ever interested in politics, he'll write a novel like Painted Desert, which immerses itself in race and politics and culture. Strange, longing references to childhood Catholicism sneak into works like The Brothers.

His latest novel, Bob the Gambler, is, naturally, about gambling. In some senses, then, it's back on the old Barthelme territory of consumerism, but there are clear signs of the deepening empathy for his characters that has marked his latest work, a sweetness of tone, a hopefulness of outlook. His protagonist here is not named Bob at all, but Ray Kaiser (the title's a reference to the film Bob le Flambeur, which Ray brings home from the video store). He's an architect, but not a very convincing one, since his remarks about his work are vague and general: "We had a lot of ideas for this house, but whenever I drew it up the place looked remarkably unexotic. "This is a quibble, however, for Ray's architectural practice is failing at the beginning of the novel anyway, and he and his wife Jewel make utterly believable gamblers. They are also gamblers with whom readers are bound to sympathize, gamblers whose actions are completely predictable or, maybe, inevitable - at least once they've set themselves in motion.

From the beginning, Barthelme sets up a parallel between the decline of Ray and Jewel and the decline of Jewel's fourteen-year-old daughter, RV (the name is never explained, but maybe it doesn't need to be). RV is a great presence in the book, a focal point beyond themselves for Ray and Jewel, who at the beginning of their foray ignore the girl's obvious pleas for attention (in a good objectification of her need, she's always hungry, and her parents have always forgotten about dinner). While RV plays around with vodka and cars and a Motel 6, Ray and Jewel have fallen under the spell of the Paradise Casino (another neon sign of a name), lovingly and wittily described. Early on, we meet a character named Baby whose first husband has died in the Paradise, and we don't need any further signal that this is a novel about the kind of death that gambling can bring on.

Barthelme makes funny references to Dostoevski's obsessions with gambling and has Ray construct his own funny running commentary about betting. "I sort of felt it was more exhilarating to lose a lot than win a little," he says. "Losing meant you had to play more, try harder. Losing burned intensely; winning became tepid fast." Eventually, Ray spends one long night of the soul losing every piece of credit he can get his hands on. Barthelme's description of that night is an exhilarating wonder. When Ray sets fire to present and future, ennui goes up in flames, and Barthelme is absolutely convincing about Ray's need to destroy the empty, vapid security he has built up.

Ray and Jewel and RV sell all their possessions and move in with Ray's mother, a good, quirky, character who's faced her own dark night when her husband, whom she's left, died alone in a Houston condo. The family, stripped of its material goods, finds a center (and begins eating dinner again). The gambling, which the reader has almost certainly experienced with dread, has functioned as a cleansing fire in the end, and the story (except for its strange elliptical conclusion, which I found frustrating in the old-Barthelme way) is full of redemptive possibility.

Bob the Gambler is openly sympathetic to its characters and their longing for meaning. There is something more engaged in Barthelme's later work, and especially in this novel, something more purposeful, something less irritating, more satisfying. It's as if, this time around, Barthelme has accompanied Ray on his scary, funny, crucial journey. He's not standing on the sidelines, amused and ironic, anymore.

Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her latest novel is Brain Fever (Doubleday).