Either Side of Winter Benjamin Markovits Faber & Faber, 235pp, £10.99 ISBN 0571226655

Benjamin Markovits's acclaimed first novel, The Syme Papers, is an ambitious book about ambition itself, ranging across centuries and continents. Either Side of Winter, unlike its predecessor, is small and intimate, comprising four delicately balanced sections attributed to the seasons, and set among the teachers and students of a private school in New York City. The two books share the intensity of their author's eye, his gift for significant detail and his fierce insight into the minds of his characters.

These accomplishments are all the greater given that Markovits sets his characters in dangerously tidy and familiar situations: "Fall" is "A Thanksgiving Visit"; "Winter", titled "A Second Chance", could equally be named "Christmas Holidays"; "Spring: A Girl as Fresh as Spring" is about a middle-aged English teacher's passion for his student; and "Summer: Inheritance" tells of that student's father's death. Creative writing students beware - these are subjects to be avoided, tales told too many times already. They are rarely successful, and only in the hands of truly accomplished writers. In his attentive humility before his characters, however, Markovits proves accomplished indeed.

Amy Bostick, the protagonist of "A Thanksgiving Visit", is a recent graduate hired to teach biology at the novel's unnamed private school. Midwestern, puritanical, bland, she struggles to feel at home in her newly metropolitan existence, clinging to the ideal of her father and unable to commit to her lover, a trust- fund gadabout whose ability to enjoy life both delights and discomfits her. Her parents and brother descend upon her for Thanksgiving, and the resulting muted encounters shift for ever her sense of herself, of her family, and of her place in the world. When they leave at last, she weeps: "At the relief of it all, to be on her own again, and realise that what she had put her faith in had failed her - and she was free to live by lesser lights."

Her fellow biology teacher Howard Peasbody, a thickening 40-year-old, is at the centre of "Second Chance"; but he, unlike Amy, is ultimately unable to grasp the nettle. Gay, haughty, he lives with his much younger German lover Tomas, and contemptuously dismisses much of life. An unexpected letter from an old college friend opens a door: it emerges that she and he had a brief liaison, from which a child, now a teenager, resulted. Over weeks, the two couples - mother and daughter, Howard and Tomas - briefly form something like a family; but Howard is driven to destroy this new intimacy.

Yet another colleague, Stu Englander, similarly stifled, harbours a passion for young Rachel Kranz: "She was an absolute cipher to him, an image of girlhood in its own carefully presented perfection. He blushed occasionally when he saw the top of her head approaching in a crowded hallway, and prepared a distant look to pass her by without having to greet her." When another teacher elopes with a student, Stu becomes more fully fixated upon his pupil, who is linked, in his mind, with his manipulative and adventurous first lover. His wife - "a very fat woman with a certain formidable elegance, the shapeliness of a filled vase" - watches at his side, sympathetic and patient. When finally his fantasy fizzles she is there, a figure of grace.

Rachel Kranz, meanwhile, is only marginally aware of her English teacher's love, which she manipulates idly. She is preoccupied with her classmate Brian Bobek, and with her beloved father's impending death from brain cancer. The lessons that she learns are more hopeful, perhaps, than those of her teachers - "It was impossible to ignore any longer, much as she tried to: her parents' love. She was the child of love. In the years to come this fact seemed increasingly significant." Rachel will be rich - her father has left her a fortune - and in this may lie the promise of a wider life; but she realises, too, that he has himself been unsatisfied. There are no guarantees of happiness.

Markovits keenly explores the power and inevitable sadness of the hidden life. As Stu Englander tells his class about Hamlet: "The modern experience is def-ined by this: if you refuse to act, wider worlds open up within." These wider worlds, however, are not reality, and the book is suffused with the pain of the characters' inability to confront this fact. If the novel has a flaw, it is perhaps Markovits's generosity: each of his characters is granted, at least sometimes, the author's piercing insight. But if we all saw so clearly, the world would be a different place altogether.

Claire Messud's most recent book, The Hunters: two novellas, is published by Picador

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