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Anthropology is the muse in Robert Hellenga's Snakewoman of Little Egypt (Bloomsbury, $25), an inventive, resonant novel with an unlikely love affair at its core. In its overarching story, Hellenga twines the lives of the randy, thoughtful Jackson, a professor, and Sunny, a spirited woman out of prison after doing time for shooting but not killing Earl, the preacher she married when she was 16. But there are many other story lines, an acute sense of place, and atmosphere to burn.

Jackson cut his anthropological teeth doing fieldwork among the Mbuti, a pygmy tribe in Africa's Congo. Actually, he did far more there, crossing the objectivity line: He married a Mbuti woman and they had a daughter, whom he misses acutely. But the comforts of academia call, leading him back to the United States. When the attractive, resourceful Sunny rents an apartment from him, however, his life changes. As does Sunny's.

A wonderful observer with a sharp take on life in a university town, Hellenga plunks his key characters into revealing situations, crafting a clever symmetry from the anthropology common to both the Mbuti and the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, the snake-handling congregation where Sunny and Earl clash in such a world-changing way.

Recounting the novel's many strands doesn't communicate Hellenga's crafty, mesmerizing style, a marvelous melange of the mundane and the magical. Not only does he conjure the Mbuti environment credibly, he communicates the wild atmosphere of the snake-handling church with singular zest, and even the sex scenes, which are notoriously difficult to craft, are believable. I love this exchange, a brew of pretension and detail that tells us much a great deal about Jackson and Sunny, as they discuss their lovemaking:

" ‘You took me inside you,' he said, ‘and devoured my seed when I was most vulnerable, and you were most triumphant. I explored your dark continent at my own risk. You lured me on. But because I survived the encounter, you will now share your great riches and power with me, because you love me.'

"It wasn't really funny, but I started to laugh. ‘Is that what really happened- '

" ‘That's what really happened,' he said.

"I thought maybe he was right."

Talk about purple prose. But also talk about how skillfully Hellenga injects humor to reduce the swelling.

Ultimately, Hellenga's exploration of the many levels of life in the Little Egypt section of Southern Illinois becomes a dissertation on individual growth. The plot turns are unexpected and compelling, and I don't want to give too much away. However, at the end, Jackson, Sunny, Sunny's friend Claire (a kind of stand-in, perhaps, for Hellenga) and Paul DeVries, a timpanist whom Sunny does more than befriend, find themselves - if not each other. As for Earl and his buddies from the snake-handling church, that's another story. Credit the gifted Hellenga for pulling these lines together, inviting us into a world of American vernacular that's an unexpected pleasure to visit.

Carlo Wolff is a Cleveland-based free-lance writer.