Grappling With God : REVELATIONS, By Sophy Burnham ; (Ballantine: $20; 488 pp.)

It is an irony that in contemporary American fiction, the theological search for meaning is under-represented and all but absent. We have Updike and . . . Wallace Stegner?

As a society, we are profoundly and deeply divided around the question of religion. Our money is inscribed, “In God We Trust,” yet we fight bitter battles over prayers in school and the right to choice. At its bedrock level, much of American law is an attempt to legislate morality: Adultery, homosexuality, certain heterosexual positions and acts are illegal in many states. Clearly, placing our trust in God doesn’t mean we trust each other. Far from it. Ours remains a puritanical society with a prurient interest in the doings of others.

“The Scarlet Letter” remains an American classic because it focuses on the “What Will the Neighbors Think?” obsession that has made such a success of People magazine and the tabloid press. In America, the neighbors do think--long and hard--about the doings of others. It is then against this rich backdrop of, yes, snooping and True Confessions that Sophy Burnham has written a stunning first novel, “Revelations.”

“Revelations” combines a mystic’s luminous humanism with a skeptic’s view of human nature. Writing with the social precision of an American E. M. Forster, Burnham has crafted a novel for grown-ups. A book like Burnham’s draws to our attention how many of our fictions today are thinly written.

From “Our Town” to “Inherit the Wind” to “The Great Gatsby,” much of our finest writing has been grounded in a sense of community. Over and over we have turned to the question of rebellion versus convention--a natural enough question for a country founded by visionaries, expanded by mercenaries and torn always between idealism and commerce.

Much of our best literature concerns the quests of visionaries and madmen, mired or grounded in the Calvinism of convention. “Revelations” centers on just such a blighted visionary, the Rev. Thomas Lewis Buckford. As we meet him, the newly arrived pastor to a rich and well-fed flock, Buckford is suffering a spiritual and marital drought. His God, like his wife, seems chilly and withdrawn, distant and impossible to please.

“Months earlier, a desolation had come over him, a darkening of the soul. His joy in life had disappeared. There were words for it in the Christian litany: he had lost his believing hope.”

An earthy, passionate man blessed with a good heart and a generous, if impulsive, nature, Buckford quickly sets a foot afoul of his prissy Episcopalian parishioners, Virginia’s landed gentry.

Buckford’s very virtues--a lack of pretension, a disregard for social hierarchy, a deep and committed love of God and will to serve--become his undoing.

His new parishioners, rather pleased with themselves to begin with, are not too enthralled with the idea of spiritual improvement. They find his egalitarian ways offensive. For one thing, he opposes segregation! Invited to a luncheon, he stops by the kitchen to chat with the help, deeply offending the hostess. Her husband consoles her, “He’s just a minister, Carolyn; you can’t expect him to know right from wrong.”

When Tom prays to his arid God, “Let me love again,” he little expects to be plunged into an adulterous affair. And yet, Elizabeth, a married parishioner, opens his long-sealed heart not only to the realm of the senses but also to the realm of the spirit. To Tom’s amazement, he begins to see both realms as one and the same.

Amid adultery, blackmail and racism, Buckford quite unexpectedly has a spiritual experience. It shoots him full of a love that threatens as well as enlightens. He sees a world shot through with God, radiant.

Although its central theme is “True Love”--of God and man--this is no piece of treacle. We have a man grappling with his God, fighting both his faith and his lack of faith. We have a God--and why not call God a character in a book like this?--infinitely more variable and creative than we so often conjure “him.”

Although this is a writerly book, “Revelations” is so insistently visual, so dramatically well-crafted that it is difficult not to watch it in the mind’s eye as a powerful 1940s melodrama. The book does not so much read as play.

Although Burnham is already a best-selling author, and “Revelations” is a Literary Guild selection, you may not have heard of her. A distinguished journalist, a playwright and a nonfiction author of some repute for her insider’s book, “The Art Crowd,” Burnham achieved best-seller status for a book that went unpublished for 10 years--”too spiritual”--to be published and then, when finally published, by Ballantine, “too spiritual” to be reviewed. No matter. That book, “A Book of Angels,” found its way to best-seller lists anyhow.

She is a gorgeous writer--the full palette, dark and light, good and evil, no wishy-washy pastels. Make no mistake, this is a passionate book--and a richly erotic one as well. Burnham, a writer who comes to her celebrity late, comes to it ripened by a rich life’s experience. She deserves a readership as broad as her talent--and as discerning.