A day without romance is like a day without sunshine

David Ebershoff is the editor of a division of Random House called The Modern Library, but he left his heart in the old library. Asked by an Australian interviewer to name his "favorite books of all time," he swoons through a list of 19th-century novels, starting with Thomas Hardy's "Jude the Obscure."

That won't surprise anyone who reads his latest work, a luxurious tragedy called "Pasadena" that could sit comfortably alongside Hardy's brooding classic. Everything in this novel weeps with regret – for the loss of love and land and potential, but especially for the passing of a grand literary style. It's slow and gorgeous, full of romance and disaster, swelling with the kind of heavy symbolism that went out with scarlet A's and white whales.

What's most brilliant about "Pasadena," though, is the way the story comes to us. Its parts accumulate from shards of gossip polished into legend.

Andrew Jackson Blackwood knows that when the soldiers come back from Europe and the Pacific, they'll need houses, lots of them, and he's going to supply them. He's already made a fortune buying distressed properties during the Depression, but when he spots a rare track of empty farmland in Pasadena, he sees the potential to construct an entire neighborhood from scratch.

After a few unsuccessful attempts to negotiate with the owner, he's contacted by Cherry Nay, a slick real estate agent, who wants to make sure he hears and understands the dark history of this land. And so, over the course of several weeks, Blackwood is spellbound by the remarkable tragedy of a young woman who rose beyond her dreams but failed to catch the simple happiness she craved.

Linda Stamp was 16 when her father returned to their onion farm along the southern coast of California at the end of World War I. The family had heard nothing of his time in the service, nor of Bruder, the quiet soldier he brings home. (Think "Brude the Obscure.")

Linda meets him after staring down a shark and running out of the ocean naked carrying lobsters. So begins a smoldering romance that eventually burns both these lovers to ash.

Bruder is a sullen, intellectual man of frightening strength and patience. Though he's "won" Linda in a ghastly wartime bargain with her father, he never reveals that promise, choosing instead to earn her love through the power of his devotion. It's a peculiar courtship: He almost drowns on one date. Another involves tearing apart a dead horse. They trade bags of rattlesnake tails. He's thrilled when she snags his cheek with a fish hook.

Everything on this sweltering farm is charged with erotic electricity, the voltage rising as Linda and Bruder resist the attraction that's consuming them both. Indeed, their discipline is outdone only by the author's. Ebershoff never violates the standards of 19th-century tastes, but ironically his restraint generates more heat than all the sexual mechanics of his contemporaries.

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