A day without romance is like a day without sunshine

The story takes a dark turn when Bruder moves to the Pasadena Ranch to oversee the splendid orange groves of Willis Poore, a man he served with in Germany. Linda can't understand his sudden departure, but, as always, the two of them seem incapable of talking to one another – a failing that leads to grave tragedies later on.

Eventually, after four years of silence, Bruder offers Linda a job as a cook at the orchard, and she enters a climate where passive aggression grows as bountifully as oranges.

Willis Poore and his anorexic sister preside over the Pasadena Ranch like husband and wife, with all the creepy suggestions that implies. They move through a wonderfully described upper-class society, attending hobo costume parties and fretting over ribald allusions to their peccadilloes in the gossip columns.

Their worlds should remain entirely separate, but Bruder exercises a mysterious power over Willis. The squirrelly aristocrat resists this humiliation by enlisting Linda in a Pygmalion episode that excites her fantasies and dashes Bruder's hopes. The plantation quickly grows into a thicket of hatred and passion that Linda can't possibly untangle until she's made a series of misguided decisions about her future, attaining her dreams but losing everything she really wanted.

"If there was a difference between Linda and Bruder, it was this," the narrator writes. "He believed in the cruel inevitability of fate; and she believed that the future was hers to invent."

As Andrew Jackson Blackwood pieces together this story from his agent's gossip and Bruder's legends, the choice between fate and self-invention grows ever more baffling to him – and us.

"Pasadena" will test Ebershoff's faith in the resurgence of the long literary novel. "The Corrections" and "The Blind Assassin" earned tremendous popular and critical success, but those tomes were spiked with the kind of modern, ironic wit missing from this old-style romance.

"Pasadena" is a novel to get lost in, caught up in the melodrama of saving a frosted orchard or a chilly heart. This is a land about to be covered with strips of concrete, on the edge of an economic boom that will bury one set of aristocrats and give birth to another, with painful revolutions up and down the social ladder.

Not all the pulp here is orange, but in Ebershoff's hands it's all wildly compelling and intricately drawn. If Linda and Bruder's love meets a predictable doom, it's only as predictable as the tide and just as hypnotic.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments tocharlesr@csmonitor.com.

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