[In the following review, Prose lauds Barthelme's Two against One for its "commitment to plumbing the depths of male ambivalence and sexual confusion."]

For an alleged minimalist, Frederick Barthelme has always displayed a hearty appetite for the luminous and the extravagant, a faith in the power of serendipity to transform the anesthetized life. His disaffected characters drift through their New South condo complexes, the Hockneyesque poolscapes he has staked out as his turf, their responses so disconnected and elliptical that astonishment has ample room to sneak into the spaces between.

In "Driver," my favorite of his short stories, a young man trades his Toyota for a customized "low rider" decorated with an image of the Virgin Mary surrounded by a pack of wolves; in "Gila Flambe," a man goes to one of those ersatz tropical restaurants that seem perpetually ready to take Sidney Greenstreet's reservation, and wanders into the middle of some very odd strangers' lives.

What's striking about Frederick Barthelme's third novel, Two against One, is how rare these light-filled moments are; to say that is not to criticize the book but simply to observe how his palette has darkened, how his sense of possibility seems drastically to have diminished. His loopy humor and trenchant social observation are still very much in evidence. Yet Two against One is by far the most powerful, disturbing and interior of Mr. Barthelme's fictions, inviting us to be flies on the wall of a particularly shadowy and unwelcoming corner of its hero's psyche.

As the novel begins, Edward Lasco—who is celebrating his 40th birthday by "debating with himself the advisability of ordering, from an outfit in California, a complete, prepackaged, do-it-yourself dual-band satellite dish"—receives an unexpected birthday visit from his wife, Elise. Edward and Elise have been living apart for six months, experimenting dispiritedly with what one of their friends calls a "trial sep."

It soon becomes apparent that the rift between them is deeper, more slippery and less hopeful of easy repair than "trial sep" might imply. They are bound by 20 shared years and by what, from moment to moment, seems convincingly like love. Yet there is also hatred, contempt and, most damagingly, Edward's lack of sexual desire for his wife, a near revulsion compounded of irritation, guilt and personal history, of the "things they had done together—arguments, and talk, caring, her needs and his, all the ideas, the moments of heartbreak and hatred, all the opinions, all the fights, all the affections." The result is a complicated and apparently terminal distaste for what Edward experiences as Elise's "her-ness," the smallest manifestations of her psychic and sexual self: "He didn't like her voice sometimes, the way she sounded when she was talking, smoking. The shrillness of it. The artificial excitement. The giggling…. He'd spent some time looking at her skin, and little bits of bra. He thought it was tacky when other women let their underclothes show … but the same tiny indiscretion in Elise made him loathe her, made him think her tasteless, sloppy, unfit."

Fans of Frederick Barthelme's two previous novels—Second Marriage and Tracer—will not be entirely surprised when this knot works itself into a love triangle. Actually, Two against One includes several intersecting triangles, though the only remotely threatening one connects Edward and Elise and Elise's sometime lover, Roscoe. In the earlier novels such triads were at least partly the result of mischievous and unruly desire, but mischief—and desire—are at a premium here, and it has never been more heartbreakingly transparent that all this romantic geometry is just a symptom of something gone wrong.

As should be clear by now, the combative note and the bad odds of the novel's title refer to the sex war waged unceasingly in its pages. In its determination to pare away the layers of irony, casual self-deception and bravado that obscure the reality of modern marriage, Two against One is intermittently shocking and admirably brave. And—at least for this female reader—the book is charged throughout with the voyeuristic fascination of a report from behind enemy lines. Without psychologizing or overstepping the boundaries of its witty fictional world, the novel confronts areas of male sexuality—fear and distrust of women, the compulsion to separate sex from love, to have what Mr. Barthelme calls "the body without the head," and even a certain dislike for the messiness of sex itself—that have rarely been written about so honestly, not for fear of alarming women (when has that ever been a limiting factor?) but because of the challenge these issues pose to men's sense of themselves and to our traditional notions of manhood.

What keeps the novel itself from sounding (consciously or unconsciously) misogynistic is its high degree of awareness. Unlike writers who unthinkingly endorse their heroes' worst prejudices and appear to take it as a given that women truly are loathsome because, at unguarded moments, they let scraps of underwear show, Mr. Barthelme monitors Edward's squeamishness and seems, like Edward, tormented by its implications. Unlike novels in which heroes with marital troubles still manage to have a rollicking good time, Two against One is so suffused with loneliness and angst that some sections—most notably, a long scene in which Edward and Elise discuss the reasons she left—are almost unbearably painful to read.

There are some unsteady touches. The portrayal of a rather mulish self-styled feminist feels a bit weighted and suspect. A scene of erotic and quasi-ritualistic closeness between Elise and a woman named Kinta makes reality sound like a worst-case male-paranoid fantasy of female bonding and exclusivity. Nonetheless, it's impressive how—given its risky subject matter—the novel elicits our compassion and dismay, rather than our anger.

Like so much of Mr. Barthelme's fiction, Two against One is exceptionally readable—funny, deft and engaging. Yet in this book the bizarre, serendipitous moments have been replaced by moments of insight, by a greater commitment to plumbing the depths of male ambivalence and sexual confusion, which Mr. Barthelme has skated on the surface of for so long. At one point Edward says to Elise, "Some of the stuff we did wasn't pretty." The same. I suppose, could be said for what is revealed in these pages. Frederick Barthelme's portrait of the mid-life late-20th-century American married man is not, as they say, a pretty picture, but rather a strong, unsparing one. Reading it, we keep asking: Has it really come to this? Are men and women really so at odds? This is very much a novel for these unsettling times, when we are learning to recognize the truth by how deeply we long to disbelieve it.