The Burning Thomas Legendre Little, Brown, 416pp, £14.99 ISBN 0316731919

Combining a radical critique of neoclassical economics with a story of marital strife might not seem a promising recipe for a first novel. It is a measure of Thomas Legendre's skill that he manages to make this strange hybrid work in The Burning, a novel that mixes a spirited challenge to our faith in economic growth with a full-blooded tale of infidelity and romantic redemption.

The story opens in Las Vegas, a city where love and money are seldom separate things. Logan Smith, a recent doctoral graduate in economics, is taking a brief vacation on the Strip before commencing his search for an academic post. During a visit to a grand casino, the naive young scholar is given an unexpected lesson in practical economics by Dallas Cole, a volatile poker dealer who coaxes him to a winning night at the table and, later, to another jackpot in her bedroom.

The story jumps forward 18 months to find the couple living as wary but passionate newly-weds in Phoenix, Arizona, where Logan has just started work as an assistant professor at a sprawling university. The young teacher, whose dissertation "implicitly criticised the ideology of the economics profession", finds himself at odds with his more staid colleagues, most notably a neoconservative department head with close ties to the private sector. Dallas, meanwhile, is starting to have second thoughts about leaving the bright lights of Vegas for life with an obsessive intellectual in a city where "subdivisions were consuming the Sonoran Desert at the rate of one acre per hour". She also regrets her dispiriting job at a third-rate casino on a local Indian reservation.

Their marriage begins to come apart when Logan meets Keris Aguilar, an attractive astrophysicist. She alerts him to Nicholas Georgescu, an obscure economist whose work crystallises every-thing Logan has been thinking about the fallacious foundation of contemporary economic theory. Georgescu argued that an economy is not a closed system of supply and demand, but rather a natural entity that is subject to entropy law, "which states that the amount of available energy irrevocably decreases in an isolated system". In other words, "you can't burn the same piece of coal twice". Logan realises that pro-growth economists are committing a fatal error by refusing to acknowledge that we are exhausting the world's resources, parti-cularly its fuel, in our ongoing quest for bigger, brighter, better markets.

As Logan and Keris team up to present their contentious theory at a major conference, a neglected Dallas succumbs to a gambling addiction, secretly draining her husband's savings to fund her own exploration of the darker precincts of the economy. Meanwhile, Logan's slick supply-sider colleague Deck arrives in Arizona and quickly sets his voracious eye on Keris. The resulting emotional pyrotechnics are handled with a deftness and confidence that are rare in a first-time novelist.

Also rare is a book that can carry a social message with such gravity and conviction. Legendre's critique of economic orthodoxy will provoke most readers this side of Dick Cheney. As Logan comes to understand, "The problem arises from our conceptualisation of the economy as a kind of perpetual motion machine - a simple flow of goods and service - rather than a one-way throughput that consumes energy and generates waste along with commod-ities." In other words, unless we slow the machine down, it will chew up our planet.

Of course, compelling theory hardly makes for good fiction. For that, you need full-blooded characters, and here, too, Legendre proves adept. The love affair between Logan and Keris is rendered with remarkable feeling and credibility. But the novel's greatest accomplishment is Dallas, a woman of great passions and considerable guile who is nevertheless being burned alive by an economic system that sees human beings as little more than fuel for its mindless and ultimately self-destructive growth.

Stephen Amidon's most recent novel is Human Capital (Penguin)

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