Kaaterskill Falls.

Allegra Goodman The Dial Press, $23.95, 324 pp.

Alice McDermott 

Late in this marvelous novel by the author of Total Immersion and The Family Merkowitz, one of the central characters allows herself a moment of self-satisfaction. Elizabeth Shulman is a devoted wife and mother, a devout Orthodox Jew who lives comfortably in the confines of her family and her faith, but who recognizes nevertheless her desire, "intense as prayer," to create something "in the shimmering, spinning secular world," something that is hers alone.

In the summer of 1977 she has responded to this longing by opening, with the permission of her rabbi, the formidable Elijah Kirshner, a small kosher grocery in Kaaterskill, New York. The store caters to the needs of her city friends and neighbors, Kirshner followers all, who spend their summers in the small upstate town, and its success brings Elizabeth her moment of pride. "Somehow it returns to her - " Goodman writes, "the sense that this is her project, that she has created something of her own, even within the tight weave of associations in Kaaterskill - the family, the Kehilla, the neighborhood. She has knit from this mesh something entirely new."

Much the same can be said of Allegra Goodman's achievement here, for out of the limited and tightly bound world of her Orthodox Jewish characters she has created a novel that is as complex and intricate and wide-ranging in its wisdom as anything in recent fiction.

The novel follows three Orthodox Jewish families over the course of nearly three years, three summers in leafy Kaaterskill and various gatherings and holidays back in the city. The Shulmans' family life forms the center of the narrative, restless Elizabeth and her five growing daughters, her pious husband Isaac, the gentle ebb and flow of their religious and domestic life, the rise and fall of Elizabeth's ambition.

Their Kaaterskill neighbor Andras Melish and his wife and teen-age daughter form a second layer of narrative. Melish, a Hungarian who escaped the ravages of World War II as a teen-ager and is drawn to the town by his two beloved, aging sisters, watches with some bewilderment as his young Argentinian wife struggles to maintain every tradition of their Orthodox household; traditions that have become for him impossible to take seriously. "Andras's parents taught him that if you are going to be religious, you have to do it all, observing every holiday and law. They believed that when it comes to God you can't do things by halves - which is why they did nothing." His daughter Renee, seeking to find her own way to rebel within the confines of her family and her religion, befriends free-spirited Stephanie, an American girl of Arab descent, daughter, the story implies, of a criminal.

At the beating heart of the community, and the novel, is Rav Kirshner, a complex, richly drawn character, a rabbi who wears the "modern dress of the nineteenth-century man of business," a rationalist "interested in law, not myth." Here he is as he views, from the second story of his Kaaterskill home, his people walking to shul: "He wonders what they are thinking; how they view the world. There are fewer now from Germany.... Their sabbaths have none of that grandeur, none of that ease.... Missing, and impossible to reclaim, is the old confidence about the world. A holocaust of blood has washed away his congregants' pretensions to a natural place, a decorative culture, a luxuriant, liberal education. The inner confidence remains."

As the ailing Rav approaches the end of his life, he must recognize his heir and reconcile his feelings for his two sons, Jeremy, the brilliant scholar who has turned against the religious life to find success in the secular academic world, or the dedicated but slow-witted Isaiah, who aided and abetted by his own wife Rachel, has remained his father's faithful secretary.

But Kaaterskill lolls cannot be reduced to its lines of narrative or machinations of plot. The novel is instead a tapestry, a panoramic view of a community, a people and a place, that is as impressive in its scope its almost nineteenth-century ability to create an interconnected world - as it is in its perfect-pitch use of dialogue and detail. (An eight-year-old singing an ancient hymn is "like a kazoo performance of Beethoven." Andras's wife Nina pronounces the word assimilation "slowly, as if she doesn't want to set it off.")

If the novel takes a misstep it is perhaps when it moves outside of this world it so beautifully establishes, and seeks to portray with equal authority the lives of the Yankee year-round residents of Kaaterskill, an effort that is admirably ambitious but that results only in several stock portraits of "townies," and a subplot involving a decade-old traffic accident and a real estate developer that adds nothing to the quiet rhythm of the novel as a whole.

For it is the novel's quiet rhythm that finally gives Kaaterskill Falls its strength. It is a rhythm that eloquently, inexorably comes to depict a careful, considered, reverent regard for the place religion has in both the natural world and in the lives of believers, an understanding of the way their faith shapes their days, their journey through life, as clearly and inevitably as does the progression of the seasons. Elizabeth knows that "her religious life is not something she can cast off, it's part of her. Its rituals are not rituals to her; not objects, but instincts." Her husband Isaac recognizes a duty that "in his daily studies he still strive to understand, identify, to take a text to heart, to reach through the centuries of commentary, those layers of responsa, and grasp a meaning that is strong, believable. And when it happens, and the words unfold for him and touch his life, this is a moment of great joy."

Alice McDermott's most recent novel, Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is a National Book Awards finalist.