THE FORGOTTEN CONDITION OF THINGS, by Robert Froese, Flat Bay Press, Harrington, Me., 2002, $14.

What a splendid surprise! Here comes this book from a small Maine publisher written by a fellow whose name has never turned up on anyone’s bestseller list and, guess what, it’s a jewel. It’s a diamond, multifaceted, each detail cut with the sure and certain touch of a master novelist.

Did I like this book? Does a bear live in the woods? How could you not be swept away by a book of precisely crafted sentences: prose written with the kind of attention to detail readers hardly ever see anymore. You don’t skip a sentence in this finely structured novel; you pause and go back and read it again for the lyricism there to be savored.

The setting is a mental hospital, one of those great, gray, granite institutional buildings that are still standing here and there in Maine, monuments to the 19th century when such places built with tax money were meant to last, and last and last. These labyrinthine structures enclose the same dark and hidden spaces that lurk within the wounded minds of their patients. And many of the staff as well.

Evelyn Moore, a clinical psychologist, recently moved to Down East Maine from a Connecticut suburb, is one of those staffers, and Sophie Davenport is one of the inmates. Author Robert Froese, on the faculty at the University of Maine at Machias, gives each of them marvelously individual voices; the two women are very much alive on the book’s pages. They are people readers will get to know well, two women who carry this complex tale of human relationships as easily you pick the keys to the family car off the kitchen table. Froese knows his craft. What’s more, he takes pains to see that it’s well executed. You will look long and hard before you read another book so finely structured from beginning to end.

OK, as an aging (and, I’m told, often cranky) editor, I tend to revel in fine writing, to take palpable pleasure in perfectly wrought sentences and insights so clearly expressed. So I would have smiled over this novel for its structural excellence alone. But, hey, there’s a story here, a tale charged with drama and the pulse of human existence, as every good novel should be. You will be there beside Evelyn and Sophie as they are so intensely challenged by events unfolding and exploding within those great, gray institutional walls.

But you cannot help but be delighted, even diverted, by the author’s mastery of style. “You’ll hear it said,” he writes in the paragraph that encloses the title, “that the fog rolls in. That is the way it looks from a distance. But once it has you locked inside, it’s not like that at all. From inside, it’s more like the forgotten condition of things. You open your eyes, and there you see what has been all along, inescapable now that the air has appeared like the wall of God, shutting out all that familiar, private noise.”

This is Sophie speaking, Sophie the patient, who, it turns out, also becomes a healer. She is a superbly drawn character who will walk beside you long after you finish this captivating and challenging tale. “Sophie,” says Evelyn, “seems that kind of person, to make people look at their own lives. That seems to be her gift.”

Evelyn knows whereof she speaks. For it is Sophie who has led Evelyn to re-evaluate her angular relationship with her husband, Richard. In one of this memorable book’s memorable scenes, Richard calls from Boston to explain why he’s been gone so long and to say when he might return. “Don’t come back,” says Evelyn, and when Richard begins yet another voluble rationalization, she tells him one more time, “Richard, don’t come back.” And this is the start of Evelyn’s healing.

Yes, this is a book full of humanity’s stories, and you will enjoy it and remember it for that. But you will also have this book forever on your mind because it sets such a high standard for writers of the English language. Take my word for it, this is an exceptional novel. Read it and you’ll know why.