Few authors can meticulously and exhaustedly detail the most commonplace moments -- a stack of paper drifting to the floor, a block of ice melting in a sweltering car or a beam of sunlight illuminating a room -- without losing a reader's attention. If it is done successfully, such descriptive writing helps a reader fully submerge into the world the author has created.

	"THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER" By Robb Forman Dew Little, Brown & Co. ($24.95)

In her new novel, Robb Forman Dew not only richly illustrates scenes and events, but also aptly paints the interior world of a middle-aged widow, transporting the reader into the woman's empty nest in a small Ohio town during and immediately after World War II.

Dew, the winner of a National Book Award in 1982 ("Dale Loves Sophie to Death"), revisits the prominent Scofield family and other residents of fictional Washburn, Ohio, whom she first introduced in the 2001 novel "The Evidence Against Her."

The story now seems to focus on Agnes Scofield, who was a young wife in the first book and is now the mother of four adult children (she raised her youngest brother, who is 19 years younger, as her own son) and has been a widow for more than a decade.

The book follows Agnes and her family for about nine years, from early 1941 to 1950, as Agnes' sons and daughter leave home to help the war effort and eventually return to Washburn with new families and adult lives. The author explores the protagonist's shifting identity, the children's indifference toward their mother and Agnes' husband's death, which Agnes suspects was a suicide. Identity and the balance between a person's public persona and private self seem to be prominent themes here. The book begins with a flashback to a conversation Agnes and her husband, Warren, had before he died in a car accident. Warren tells Agnes, "We've all agreed to live in a sort of ... oh ... a sort of cocoon that's shaped of other people's idea of us."

Like other women of her time, the world around Agnes has seen her as only a wife and mother for most of her life. But it's a persona that's bound to change now that her husband is dead and her children are grown.

Her children, who are often indifferent to her opinions and ideas, cannot or will not see her in any context outside the home. Her daughter is disgusted when Agnes attempts to discuss her sexuality; her son is irritated when she adopts a dog for companionship after the family moves out of her home.

Agnes' own definition of who she is is intrinsically linked to the home. The protagonist thinks of her children as unwittingly rude because "it never occurred to them that a criticism of anything in the household -- the old-fashionedness of the refrigerator, the faded wallpaper in the back parlor -- was an indictment of her."

It's a pleasant surprise when Agnes defies societal expectations when she begins a secretive and purely sexual relationship with an old family friend named Will and later rejects his marriage proposal.

The residents of Washburn have also created a mythology about Agnes' family, which owned an engine manufacturing company that was the town's major employer.

Observers expected Scofield family members to be good looking, successful and friendly; these same observers often noted that Agnes did not fit into the Scofield mold. It's not until an outsider marries into the family that some of the mythology is shattered.

But even with its lush and lyrical writing, "The Truth of the Matter" can be as slow as the provincial Ohio town in which it is set. Sometimes, a reader can't bring herself to care about a small town's sesquicentennial celebration, no matter how well the passage is written.

While Agnes' character is round and dynamic, some other characters, particularly her children, seem cold and stiff, and the dialogue among them can be stilted. It's likely that Dew purposely created them this way to illustrate the public formalness people maintained during this era.