In Nell Freudenberger's fine second novel, "The Newlyweds," George Stillman is a fairly dull but pleasant and very pragmatic engineer who lives in a suburb of Rochester, N.Y., and, with the help of an online service called AsianEuro.com, has found a new bride from Bangladesh. The bride, Amina Mazid, is an ambitious, confident, single child whose father was a hero in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. Since then, though, he has struggled to succeed in his business endeavors (hindered by an acid-throwing, psychotic cousin whom the Mazid family once suspected of locking their apartment door from the outside with the intention of setting fire to the building).

For Amina, the contrast between her father and her new husband is huge: Her father's sudden and great temper earned him the nickname of "Thunder," but George is passive in comparison. "If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke -- and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth?"

Amina and George are well-suited to one another, although they do have the usual travails of newlyweds: living with each other's quirky habits and manners, making difficult decisions about starting a family, having troubles with their jobs, and worrying about Amina's aging parents. Complicating this considerably is Amina's shocking discovery that George had an amorous and controversial relationship -- before they married -- with a woman who had recently become Amina's close friend.

Nell Freudenberger, one of the New Yorker's "20 under 40" writers, is a grand storyteller who sets this novel in the United States and in Bangladesh, mixing in elements of Amina's past (her first love with a boy, Nasir, now a man with Islamic fundamentalist leanings) with her present-day experiences of what it means to be a brown-skinned immigrant in upstate New York ("So what are you, anyway?" Amina is asked by a potential employer).

In "The Newlyweds" Freudenberger gives us the best of what a great novel can offer: an eloquent assessment of the human condition, revealed here in Amina's reflections upon returning to Bangladesh, "You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together -- until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did."

Jim Carmin, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Portland, Ore.