RUNNING THE BULLS, by Cathie Pelletier, University Press of New England, Lebanon, N.H., 2005, 276 pages, $17.48.

It has been nine years since we’ve had a Cathie Pelletier novel, but the recently-released “Running the Bulls” is as sure and accomplished as anything she has written before.

Although not one of Pelletier’s Mattagash novels (“The Funeral Makers,” “Once Upon a Time on the Banks,” “The Weight of Winter,” and “Beaming Sonny Home”), “Running the Bulls” is set in a Maine landscape just as detailed and authentic as those books set in the St. John Valley.

Howard Woods is a late-middle-aged man when, in 1998, his wife, Ellen, confesses to an affair she’d had years before with a friend of the couple. Howard, in a gesture with unanticipated and unintended consequences, leaves Ellen and sets up housekeeping, of a sort, in a local motel.

The novel’s events take place during the summer and fall after Ellen’s confession, all within the confines of Bixley, Maine – a town somewhat resembling Bangor in size, in distance from Portland, and in its possession of a community college where the Woodses as well as Ellen’s one-time lover taught.

And Howard, now retired, continues to see all of life from the perspective of the literature courses he taught. Specifically, at this time in his life, he becomes obsessed with Hemingway, with “The Sun Also Rises,” and with the tradition of running the bulls in Pamplona.

Howard is convinced that his life has been untested, without heroism, without danger or passion. “‘I need to pay my dues,'” he tells one of the friends who gather in the motel’s bar every evening, men of the generation that never had a war: too young for World War II and Korea, too married/settled for Vietnam, too old for the first Gulf War. They matured in the sunshine of the 1950s, reasonably sure that although clouds might gather at the horizon, they wouldn’t presage killer storms.

Howard and Ellen’s son John, however, flew a bomber in the first Gulf War, and when Howard measures himself against his son, he feels diminished. This, combined with the knowledge of his wife’s betrayal, propels him into a crisis out of which he can see only one path to resolution: he buys a ticket to Pamplona and makes his plans to run the bulls.

What he doesn’t understand, of course, is that courage is tested every day of our lives here at home, and that medals are awarded for bravery right in our living rooms. As the novel plays out, however, he finally sees that “‘it takes a lot of courage to lead a small life.'”

What precipitates Howard’s realization is an incident that turns the novel from humor, and at times farce, to the tragic. As the tone changes to suit the plot, readers will find themselves grieving with Howard instead of laughing at him. And realizing, along with him, that “It all takes time and then, then, the comeback’s the thing.”

This facility of Pelletier’s to take the reader from laughter to tears, from seeing characters at a distance to identifying with them, is one of the particular pleasures of reading her novels. Another is her talent for creating all the characters, even ones who play a secondary role, with enough quirks and unexpected moves to make them fully believable; and yet another, her ability with a phrase or sentence to set the reader back on his heels, no more able than the character to accept sentimentality, staleness of thought.

At one point, for example, Howard thinks of Byron, “outfitting an entire ship that he would then sail to Greece to help fight for their independence.” But then: “he tried not to think of how Lord Byron had died fever-stricken in Greece, thirty-five years old. Leeches had sucked the blood out of him as if it were his last, fluid poem.”

The book’s central metaphor begins with a game of golf – not the game itself, however, but the course in Bixley on which it is played. The eighteen holes sit atop a landfill, one whose detritus pokes periodically to the surface, a constant reminder of the decay underneath. Howard begins even to see manifestations of the golf course in a face, “a kind of landfill where everything was obliged to finally rise to the surface, wrinkles, age spots, carcinogens, even deceit … .”

As betrayal, anger, negligence and rage rise to the surface, Howardrealizes finally that we need to forgive ourselves “[for scurrying like blind moles across The Big Landfill, a place where rules are bent or broken, a kingdom where unfairness runs rampant.”

As for the novel, though, as we traverse its pages, that which rises to the surface is more in the way of treasure: the ridiculous, the sublime, the admixture of funny and sad, characters we take to our hearts living the lives we all do, attempting one comeback after another.

Cathie Pelletier will read from her new book and sign copies at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26, at the Blue Hill Public Library, at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 27, at the University of Maine Bookstore in Orono, and at 7 p.m. Tuesday, the same day, at the Bangor Public Library.