Mormon Memories, Angeleno Enigmas : THE CHINCHILLA FARM<i> by Judith Freeman (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 319 pp.; 0-393-02722-8) </i>

When I married, years ago in a foreign city, the ceremony was conducted hastily in a language I barely understood. The circumstances were admittedly odd but also appropriate, I thought. Contrary to all the romantic literature on the subject, marriage seems finally to be an almost absurd act of faith; we have no idea what we are promising.

Judith Freeman’s first novel, “The Chinchilla Farm,” owns up to this realistic conclusion and goes far beyond it, looking square in the eye of such daunting subjects as marriage, faith and religion. It’s a fresh effort in an era that seems obsessed with the pursuit of individuality at any cost. “The Chinchilla Farm,” which follows Freeman’s well-received collection of short stories, is a beautiful, enigmatic novel that explores the nature of human connections and reveals itself in its own time.

The story begins in Utah and wanders dreamily through time and place: forward into modern life of marginal poverty in Los Angeles, and backward through a rural childhood among Mormons. Memories of a life with seven siblings (which led to imaginative uses of space in the family car), a father’s dream house that never got built, the allure of a neighboring farmer’s caged chinchillas, an airplane pilot who crashed into the Great Salt Lake--all give a resonant texture to the story of Verna Fields, a woman in the middle of her life searching for a new beginning.

Verna is likable and perceptive, occasionally wisecracking but all times vulnerable. She is a complicated product of her past. Almost voyeuristically, the book reveals the secret lives of the Latter Day Saints: Men and women, each dressed entirely in white save for a small green apron in the shape of a fig leaf, move silently through the rooms of the temple reenacting the rites of their faith. An image that runs through the book like a recurring dream is the “garment,” the gauzy, holy underwear worn by Mormons to remind them of the sacraments and promote modesty (it reaches nearly to the knees and elbows). It dangles from clotheslines everywhere, “thin and milky as cocoons or second skins shed by snakes”; it intrudes upon spontaneous lovemaking. Insubstantial and tenacious, like a spider web, it entangles the faithful and unfaithful alike.

Religion is so much more than belief. Freeman, who grew up in a Mormon family in Ogden, Utah, implies that for the Mormons, at least, religion is a universe with its own physical laws. Blunt inequalities are accepted alongside mysticism and beauty. When Verna Fields explains the arrangements of Mormon afterlife--in which her husband Leon could have up to seven wives, whereas she could have only Leon--she says flatly: “It sounds complicated, but it’s really very simple. It’s just a kind of heavenly law, which allows men more of everything.”

Verna doesn’t exactly rebel against this world, she just finds it falling away from her. Her family is oddly estranged; Leon, whom she married at 17, has left her for a woman named Pinky in tight jeans; the support system of Verna’s childhood seems rocked to its foundations by modern life. At age 34, with nothing to lose, she packs her few belongings into a horse trailer and heads for Los Angeles to “try her luck.”

In the desert, she picks up a hitchhiker with the promising name of Duluth Wing. But Verna is truly the hitchhiker, taking whatever course is required by the people who pass through her life. Her fate turns on strangers’ requests: a homeless man who needs her last dollar; a relative who must flee from her violent husband; a police officer saying, “Lady, you can’t park here.” Cut loose from her moorings, Verna drifts, keen-eyed but passive, from Utah to Los Angeles to the Baja Peninsula of Mexico.

At times her passivity is hard to endure. I wanted Verna to rail at the conservative tradition that promises women a lifetime of safety if only they will stand by their men, then deals out the cards of abandonment and poverty. But it’s ultimately to Verna’s credit that she doesn’t rail. She is wise beyond her experience and sympathetic almost beyond belief. She understands that the men who seem privileged and secure also are victims of grand deceit. Life, above all, is a struggle against being alone, and religion provides a wonderful illusion of community and continuity. Verna exclaims, “In church you could get a feeling that everything was going to be okay even when it wasn’t. What a lovely, beautiful deception! . . . We are drawn to the flickering hope, imagining that within these reverent spheres something might be mended.”

Verna concludes that marriage also is a deception--the tie that grants us momentary blindness to our mortality and insignificance and ultimate aloneness. And furthermore, it’s a far less sacred bond than the marriage of chinchillas, who mate for life and languish once they are widowed. When humans lose their mates, Verna observes, they couple again as fast as they can, with whoever is near at hand.

It sounds like a cynical conclusion, but in Freeman’s gentle hands, it is not. The author’s view of humanity is honest and forgiving. We’re flawed creatures: less noble, perhaps, than chinchillas, but more interesting to know, and lovable, not for the righteousness of our lives but the immensity of our hopes.