Four Letters of Love.

This is a novel about love: romantic love, filial love, married love, sexual love, love of God, love of nature, love of place; love in all its frailty, in all its failings, and love triumphant, even miraculous. It is a heady, often breathless novel, Niall Williams's first, and like its subject it is by turns marvelous, exhausting, heartbreaking, overblown, and delightful. A complicated love story that is buoyed throughout and in each its turnings by the author's own clear love of words.

In Dublin, Nicholas Coughlan's father hears the voice of God and suddenly abandons his civil service career, abandons, too, his dependent wife and child, and travels to the west coast of Ireland to paint. "It is," he says, "what God wants me to do."

Simultaneously, on a small island off the Galway coast, eleven-year-old Isabel Gore, the schoolmaster's daughter, the island's beauty, dances a mad dance at the edge of the sea while her brother Sean, a musical prodigy, plays the fiddle. When the dance ends she turns to find that Sean has been stricken lame and mute, "as stilled and useless as an instrument laid aside, God gone to play on someone else."

From these two disparate events, these two arbitrary, even frivolous acts of God, Williams traces the fate - the workings of God and of angels but most especially of the human heart - that will eventually lead Nicholas to Isabel and the love he was born for.

It is not a simple journey. Nicholas's father returns from his first summer sojourn with a series of canvases that strike his son as "the paintings of a demented child." Nevertheless, come the following spring, his father goes off again. His mother, under the burden of her husband's God-directed obsession, slowly fades into her own kind of madness until, overwhelmed "by the weight of failed hope and lost love," she takes her own life, even as her husband once again returns home.

Meanwhile, Isabel Gore leaves the island for a convent school in Galway. She carries with her the guilt that she has somehow caused her brother's illness, and, as a corollary to that guilt, an insatiable longing for freedom. In her final year at school, this longing finds its embodiment in Peader O'Luing, the twenty-five-year-old son of a Galway tweed merchant, a man so unsuited to the intensity of her desire that the "sickening mystery of his own heart" causes him to fall out of love with her the moment she declares her love for him. And yet for Isabel, who has sacrificed her university career and taken a job at the tweed shop, the loss of love "was the inescapable payback for what she had caused her brother ... it was the judgment of God."

Six months after his mother's death, Nicholas's father is once again compelled to return to the west coast. This time, Nicholas follows. For six days he watches his father do God's bidding, creating paintings that show "God's changing humor ... the sky in the sea like an aging face." At night Nicholas recites his schoolboy Latin for the man, "the sudden sweetness of the holy language" confirming for them both that "yes, those paintings of the sea were the very things that [God] himself had brought William Coughlan there to paint."

On the last day of this enchanted - and beautifully described - excursion, all but two of the paintings are accidentally destroyed. And yet only one of them is needed to advance Nicholas's fate, the one that is awarded to Muiris Gore, an island schoolmaster, as first place prize in a national poetry contest to which his wife, in a gesture born of her once-consuming love for him, submitted a poem he had written long ago.

It is this painting that brings Nicholas to the island after his father's death. He arrives an utter stranger, desolate, grieving, and one day after Isabel's unhappy marriage to Peader. "You're too late," a widowed neighbor cries after him. "Everything is always too late." (One of the great pleasures of the book is the number of perfectly drawn minor characters, from Peader's monstrous date-eating mother to a timid priest who prays to be spared any miracles, characters who offer a bit of relief from the more emotionally charged protagonists' struggles with God and love.)

Isabel's mother senses immediately that with Nicholas's arrival, "healing was beginning," and her premonition becomes quite literally true. In what the islanders see as nothing short of a miracle, Sean emerges from his mysterious illness in Nicholas's presence. He begins to walk and talk and play music again and takes Nicholas with him to Galway to show Isabel how he has recovered. There is among the family "a quickened sense of plot, an air of verb."

The scene of their meeting is not described. "Some things," Nicholas tells us, "do not bear much telling." But Nicholas returns to the island so clearly lovestruck that Isabel's mother smells in the air about him the scent of crushed roses. It is at this point of the novel that the story grows understandably breathless. Throughout, Williams has described so many different kinds of love, so many romances, so much emotion, and described them so well, that the descriptions of Nicholas's passion for the absent Isabel begin to feel somewhat strained and the novel hits a kind of stasis as Nicholas writes his love letters and Margaret Gore methodically destroys them, even the one that consists only of a single word, the four letters of love.

But this is a small shortcoming in a novel filled with so many delightful moments and momentous turns. An unabashedly romantic novel about the many faces of love that manages, finally, to prove that in this instance at least "the plots of God and of love came together and were the same thing."

Alice McDermott's fourth novel, Charming Billy, will be published in January.