[De Haven is an American novelist, screenwriter, and author of children's literature. In the following review of Saving St. Germ, he explains that the novel's "unconvincing, hurried conclusion can't spoil what in all other respects is a truly original work of fiction."]

"I've always believed that science requires its practitioners be in a state of despair, informed despair," says Esme Charbonneau Tallich, the narrator of Carol Muske Dukes's second novel, Saving St. Germ. The Harvard-trained biochemist is proof of her own hypothesis. For someone who longs only to "putter or theorize," and who often forgets she has a body as well as a mind, a job as well as a calling, a family as well as an advanced degree, the laboratory of daily life can almost seem like a torture chamber.

In Esme, Ms. Muske Dukes, the author of five books of poetry and a previous novel, Dear Digby, has created a character as likable as she is off-putting, with habits, quirks and observations that startle you with their strangeness but always feel true. Here's a woman who mentally builds "the chemical architecture of nicotine" when she craves a cigarette and "the skeletal structure of Tylenol" if she has a headache, a woman who likens marriage to "an unremitting gaze" and strolls home from work "immersed in contemplation of immunodetection of tyrosine phosphorylation on protein 70K"—unlike most of us, who just wonder if there's any pot roast left in the refrigerator.

Hired by the University of Greater California, in Los Angeles, to "do something flashy, fund-attracting," Esme remains stubbornly academic, openly hostile to the "social enlightenment"—the medical applications—of genetic research: "I don't believe I can save everybody…. I want them saved but I can't do it." She'd rather work on "saving St. Germ. Some tiny little organism, some protein sequence that's going to change the quality of human life, but only intellectually, only as a model for thought." In other words, give her a computer and a paycheck on Friday—and please shut the door on your way out. Dream on, Esme.

While her mulishness at U.G.C. rankles both faculty members and fast-track doctoral students, Esme's "emotional reluctance" at home infuriates, then finally estranges, her husband, Jay, a technical director for a television show and an aspiring stand-up comic. ("The fact was," says his coolly objective wife, "almost anybody I knew was funnier than Jay.") Though he's willing, almost, to forgive Esme her complete lack of interest in Hollywood history, stars and gossip—the stuff that lends texture to his life—he won't forgive her total (and, to his mind, practically criminal) acceptance of their daughter's alarming eccentricities.

A 5-year-old given to speech that sounds feverish, even Dadaistic ("This light is too loud"; "This air in my hand, in this minute, is not blue"; "I am talking in the red language"), Ollie walks around the house wearing a carboard box on her head—when she isn't twirling in circles or staring off into space. Her doctor suspects "emotional dysfunction, with hints of (but not) autism." Esme, however, insists that Ollie is an "unprecedented being" who is merely preoccupied, "thinking hard." When she refuses to take Ollie for psychiatric testing, Jay leaves her, suing for divorce and asking the court for custody of the child.

That crisis—along with her suspension for absenteeism from the university and the distinct possibility that an admired colleague is about to plagiarize her research—provokes Esme to become, reluctantly and clumsily, something she's always avoided being: an actor in the human drama. "I'd been unstable, unrepentant, heartless, single-minded about my goal," she thinks. "But somehow I'd had faith; the world of theory is touched by God, it had provided me a halo tunnel—I'd felt blessed, invincible. Now the walls were starting to fall and there was no longer that sense of invincibility, the giddiness of privileged vision."

After suffering an abrupt, and abbreviated, emotional collapse that sends her wandering numbly around the seedier precincts of Los Angeles, an integrated mind-body Esme emerges. That's fine for her, but an artistic false move by the otherwise rigorously unsentimental Ms. Muske Dukes. And yet her novel's unconvincing, hurried conclusion can't spoil what in all other respects is a truly original work of fiction, something fresh—the exploration of a subculture that's baffling, often intimidating, to most of us, and usually ignored by American literary novelists. Esme's lucid "Imaginary Lectures"—with subjects that range from theoretical chemistry and the "handedness" of the universe to the historical plight of women scientists and the exuberance of unfettered thought ("It's like chinning yourself on the topmost rung of the ladder to heaven")—are enough to make this reader, who managed somehow to graduate from college using oceanography and meteorology to fulfill his science requirements, wish that he'd had the guts, way back then, to get down and dirty with some tetrahedral molecules.