Byatt’s argument is just what you’d expect from someone shouldering the mantle of high culture. To show that she’s not a total killjoy, Byatt allows that Rowling’s books are entertaining and reveal “a sure instinct for childish psychology.” To answer the bigger question of what explains the series’ huge success with adults as well as children (uh, because J.K. Rowling is a master of narrative?), Byatt decides that the books represent “comfort” for their readers, embodying Freud’s notion of “family romance” (finding the surrogate family where we are appreciated for ourselves) and the chance to regress to a safe world where good and evil are readily identifiable and we feel that we are given control over the unpredictable.

Byatt may have a valid cultural point — a teeny one — about the impulses that drive us to reassuring pop trash and away from the troubling complexities of art. The problem is that her argument has nothing to do with the experience that anyone I know has had reading the Harry Potter books. Perhaps operating from the assumption that anything positive written about J.K. Rowling’s work is little more than publicity or evidence of lowered cultural standards, Byatt wastes nary a syllable on the subject that has been widely written about and discussed with both “The Goblet of Fire” and the new “The Order of the Phoenix”: the increasing darkness of the books. Rowling has conceived of the seven-book cycle as tracing Harry’s growth from childhood to late adolescence. And as the books have gone on, the dangers he faces have not only increased but, as happens with age, become less easy to shrug off, inflicting physical and psychological wounds that are not so quick to heal. In the climax of “Goblet of Fire,” Harry witnesses the murder of a classmate, an event that is still giving him nightmares in the new book. Having witnessed death, he is now prone to seeing things, not at all reassuring sights, that his classmates who have been spared experiencing death can not. And increasingly, he finds that the power that allowed him to survive the attempt Voldemort made on his life as an infant links his brain with that of the dark lord, making him feel that his goodness is forever imperiled by this access to the dark side.

In “The Order of the Phoenix,” Harry experiences the death of another character, someone very close to him, and increasing alienation from his best friends, Ron and Hermione, who don’t bear the burdens he does. Young readers who were the same age as Harry when the series began may be growing with him. But a younger group of readers who are just now beginning the series may find that the later books are too upsetting for them (in the same way that some teenage viewers of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” abandoned the show when it began dealing with the complications of young adulthood). But even if, at this point, they only read “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” they will find themselves confronted with loss. Remember, this is a character whose parents are murdered when he is an infant, and who himself is under the continual threat of death from his parents’ killer. That first book features the devastating scene where Harry encounters a mirror that reveals the heart’s truest desire and, looking into it, sees himself happy and smiling with the parents he never knew, a vision that lasts only as long as he looks into the glass, and a metaphor for how fleeting our moments of real happiness are. This is Byatt’s idea of reassurance?

Of course there’s something comforting in the Harry Potter books. I defy Byatt not to find the same qualities in all great children’s literature. She has confused comfort with escaping reality. Not only do all great fantasies relate back to the real world, any reassurance they offer always comes at a price. Kids suffer loss in the great works of children’s literature and then find that they have the strength to cope. They don’t forget their losses, but they learn to live with them. And that’s as true of the young heroines in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden” and “A Little Princess,” or the boys in Walter Farley’s “The Black Stallion” and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ “The Yearling” as it is of Harry Potter.

From the question of comfort and reassurance, Byatt moves on to even shakier ground, complaining that Rowling’s form of magic is ersatz. “Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force,” Byatt writes. “Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.” Excuse me? Anything exists in any novel only because the author says it does. That does not excuse the author from making it dramatically plausible, and if what Byatt intends to say is that for her Le Guin’s worlds are magical and Rowling’s are not, then that is an honest admission of taste. But to imply that there’s some objective standard dividing books where “magic really does act as a force” from ones where magic is a gimcrack concoction is bunk, and Byatt knows it.

And still Byatt trudges on, claiming that “Rowling speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles and not the real wild.” Well, if the author biography in my Modern Library edition of Byatt’s “Possession” is correct, the closest she has ever come to the “real wild” is growing up the daughter of a barrister and a schoolteacher in darkest Yorkshire. Unless those pages are missing an episode where, Jane-like, Byatt swung from the jungly tendrils, then it’s fair to ask how a life spent in boarding school in the British city of York, then Cambridge, Bryn Mawr and Oxford before settling in London, gave her experience of the real wild.

But this is where the crux of Byatt’s argument makes itself plain, and she is extraordinarily upfront in its snobbishness. Contemporary adults love Harry Potter, she tells us, because “they don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.” In other words, we’re too stupid to know the difference between diamonds and cubic zirconia. Byatt names us poor uncultured adult Harry lovers for what we are, “people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” How’s that for putting us in our place?

It’s clear that we’re dealing here with an acolyte at the temple of high culture barring the doors as the ignorant masses who love pop culture come a knockin’. Loath as I am to resurrect the old canard accusing writers or critics who dislike a popular work of art of being jealous, in Byatt’s case it might be true. Remember, this is the same writer who went into a highly publicized hissy fit some years back when Martin Amis was given a lucrative advance against future books. It’s only human for writers or filmmakers or musicians to feel resentful and even contemptuous when what they consider good, serious work is being passed over in favor of some pop artifact. But sooner or later, if you choose the life of a writer, you damn well better be able to make peace with the possibility that in all likelihood you will not enjoy spectacular commercial success. Byatt has it better than most, enjoying a modicum of fame, more than her share of respect, and the distinction of being one of the relative few who has been able to make a living at literary fiction. But success on the scale of J.K. Rowling’s clearly gets under her skin.

She’s not alone. Around the time that “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” was published three years ago, the New York Times Book Review, reportedly in response to complaints from publishers and literary agents, created a separate listing of children’s bestsellers and relegated the Harry Potter books there. The arguments put forth in favor of that move all claimed to be concerned with fairness. A slot on the Times’ bestseller list could mean great success for an author, the arguments went, and with Rowling threatening to occupy four slots on the list, it kept some books just bubbling under the top 15 from making it on. Tough. (When the Beatles occupied five slots in the top 10 they weren’t relegated to a British list to make room for the Beach Boys.)

There’s no doubt that publicists and agents use the Times list to sell books. But promotion can never be a consideration of people who put together a bestseller list. Either such a list is going to report the bestselling books in the country or it is not. And when a children’s novel sells 5 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale, clearly it’s not just children who are reading it, and it’s a baldfaced lie to pretend that any other book is the No. 1 bestseller. And did Rowling’s exile make room for those other lesser-known novelists? Of course it didn’t. Occasionally, a left-field success like Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” earns a spot. But the exclusion of Rowling’s books means that this week the bestseller list has more room for hacks like Clive Cussler, John Grisham, Nicholas Sparks and the born-again team of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

Nothing deserves our respect (or scorn) simply because it’s popular, no matter how popular. But literary critics almost never concern themselves with what people actually read. Sometimes there are good reasons not to. Faced with shrinking space for all sorts of reviews, I’d prefer for the novel of some unheralded new writer to get coverage rather than the latest hernia-inducer from Tom Clancy. But the literary novelists who get themselves worked up over popular fiction never stop to consider what it is that readers are responding to except, like Byatt, to put it down to the stupidity of the masses. It would be disingenuous to claim that literary fiction has altogether abandoned narrative and character. But enough literary fiction seems to have so little connection to the reasons people began reading — and keep reading — that it has to bear at least some of the blame for its own marginalization.

You would think that Byatt, whose most popular book, “Possession,” is a fat, satisfying read that offers the pleasures of narrative and character, would understand that. But maybe the book offers a clue as to why she wouldn’t. I don’t know anyone who loved “Possession” who didn’t skim through all the interpolated Victorian poems. (Reviewing the novel, enthusiastically, for the New York Review of Books, Diane Johnson quipped that Byatt’s ventriloquism of epic Victorian poetry proved the old adage “nobody likes an epic.”) People ate up the parallel stories of the two pairs of lovers, but every few chapters some damn poem about fairies or something got in the way. Byatt admits that she conceived the book as, among other things, a romance in the flavor of her childhood favorite Georgette Heyer, and as a parody of another favorite, Margery Allingham (whose books, she doesn’t seem to understand, are already parodies of the English country house mystery). “Possession” is a resounding demonstration that a contemporary novel can be literary and still be a great, engrossing read (not a distinction that would ever have occurred to the great 19th century novelists). But maybe, for Byatt, those basic pleasures, no matter how nuanced and rich her rendering, were not enough.

In making J.K. Rowling the repository of everything that’s cheap and phony in contemporary culture, Byatt seems to be arguing not just against what she sees as the inevitable cheapness of popular culture but also against the basic pleasures that draw people to books. Which is why for Byatt, as an academic as well as a novelist, the advent of cultural studies making their way into the sacred halls of academe is a betrayal. She may admit to loving Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances as a child, but now, my God, she has lived to see people actually reviewing Heyer. Heaven forfend. What doesn’t occur to Byatt is that the excesses of cultural studies (and she’s right that some of it betrays an unseemly preoccupation with crap) was a direct response to the academics who deemed any study of popular culture inappropriate at the university level. And it’s worth remembering that at one time, that bias would have prevented the study of Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart or Griffith (or any movies, for that matter).

It’s not making distinctions between high culture and pop culture that I object to. It’s the either/or scenario proposed by high-culture guardians like Byatt that seems so churlish, so ready to make the appreciation of high culture seem the dreary duty it was when we were schoolchildren. “The only reason people read is pleasure,” Leslie Fiedler once said. And I’ll end by offering another Fiedler quote that should keep Byatt and the other keepers of the cultural flame up nights. In a Salon interview a few weeks before his death, Fiedler related a story about enraging a group of academics by announcing that when he and they were all dead and forgotten, people were still going to be reading Stephen King. The ugly truth that A.S. Byatt and Harold Bloom have yet to face is that when they have been reduced to footnotes, people are still going to be reading and enjoying the Harry Potter books. And somewhere, J.K. Rowling, keeping company with Dumas and Conan Doyle and the other “nonliterary” writers who live on, will be laughing.

This can only be a qualified recommendation: “A Whistling Woman,” like the three other Frederica Potter novels, never mesmerizes the way Byatt’s best and most popular works, “Possession” and the novella “Morpho Eugenia,” do. She has a great gift for storytelling, but she isn’t consistently interested in using it, particularly when she’s feeling most ambitious. Many readers find the Frederica Potter books frustrating (in fact, this reader often does), but to the susceptible, they’re engrossing even when they irritate. Byatt took George Eliot as her model when she began the quartet back in the 1970s, and in it she most fully realizes her ideal of the novel as a form into which “you can get the whole world.”

The quartet describes mid-20th-century Britain and Frederica’s life as the quintessential bluestocking — one of the first women to study at Cambridge and, later, a divorcée with a young son making a new life in London. Like “Babel Tower,” “A Whistling Woman” covers the ’60s and dips into the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the time. In Yorkshire, where Frederica grew up, a small “therapeutic community” grows into an insular cult under the influence of an otherworldly madman whose childhood was disfigured by a horrible crime. And on the outskirts of the local university, an “anti-university” grows up, a sort of hippie camp where anyone can teach a class on such topics as astrology and Mao and there’s always a pot of bean soup simmering away. Meanwhile, Frederica stumbles into a gig hosting what sounds like an impossibly brainy and fanciful talk show for the fledgling BBC.

Frederica’s job gives Byatt an excuse to riffle through the intellectual preoccupations of the time — feminism, psychology, sociobiology, etc. Frederica is also deciding whether she wants to remarry, and what role sex and romance will play in her life as a single mother and a woman prone to fiercely declaring, “I want to think.” Byatt has never entirely succeeded in making Frederica appealing, perhaps because she’s never really tried to. So as usual it’s in the subplots of “A Whistling Woman” that the novel really clicks. Reading the quartet is a bit like patronizing a restaurant where the entrées are passable and the side dishes steal the show.

Every bit of the novel that concerns Joshua Ramsden, the mental patient who eventually takes over the Quaker group called the Joyful Companions, is riveting. Byatt is fascinated by charisma — its animal nature, the simultaneously magnetic and repellent nature of the people who possess it, and the often terrible effect it has on those drawn to it. Though she tries to do justice to the exhilarating iconoclasm of ’60s youth culture, mostly she depicts it as naive and scary, and the leaders of the anti-university as self-indulgent children who abuse their power. With Ramsden, though, she creates a man who may be merely and dangerously mad, but might instead — or also — be a genuine visionary and perhaps even acquainted with God. It’s an immensely sympathetic and yet menacing portrait, particularly in the passages Byatt tells from Ramsden’s point of view.

“Babel Tower” concludes with two trials (obscenity and custody), and “The Whistling Woman” finds its climax in the university’s Body and Mind Conference, a high-powered academic confab designed to bring together cutting-edge papers in both the sciences and the humanities. Byatt’s interest in the life sciences has apparently only grown since she wrote “The Virgin in the Garden,” with its somewhat schematic attempt to see a new Elizabethan era in 1950s Britain.

“A Whistling Woman” contains two passages in which Frederica feels a surpassing ecstasy — one while reading a passage from “The Great Gatsby” (“for the rest of her life she came back and back to this moment, the change in the air, the pricking of the hairs, of really reading every word”) and the other while looking at the earth as she walks down a Yorkshire hill to the man, a scientist, she has chosen almost by chance (“she thought that somewhere — in the science which had made Vermeer’s painted spherical waterdrops, in the humming looms of neurons which connected to make metaphors, all this was one”). She has expanded her notion of what she wants to think about from literature to the universe itself. And, here at last, Byatt has finally succeeded in squeezing the whole world into Frederica Potter.

Our next pick: A newly divorced woman casts a cold, clear eye on life in contemporary London

His next film brought further affirmation. The lineup of despicable characters in “Your Friends and Neighbors” differed from “In the Company of Men” only in number (more of them), and gender (some nasty women were thrown in for good measure). But then, along came “Nurse Betty,” a comedy, albeit a very dark one. It had moments of downright giddiness, and we had to wonder: “Is Neil LaBute going soft on us?”

Could be. LaBute’s newest film is the recently released adaption of British writer A.S. Byatt’s 1990 novel “Possession.” It is a romance, a poignant one, and a period film, to boot. Critics of the film have focused on LaBute’s surprising “departure,” but the director says it is he who is surprised — by the world’s insistence on defining his interests based on two or three films. “Possession,” he says, clearly connects to the main focus of all his work — relationships.

“It’s about two sets of people who are in love and in relationships, at least, and things happen to them where they’re emotionally tested,” he says. “I have always written about that, not just as a filmmaker, but as a playwright, and now, as a sometimes short story writer.”

LaBute was in New York recently on the eve of his film’s release and one month before his short play, “Land of the Dead,” was to be performed as part of the commemorative program “Brave New World,” a three-day marathon of readings and performances about the aftermath of Sept. 11. He talked about overcoming the assumptions of his audience, as well as movie executives — about his interests, his abilities and his religious beliefs, which, he points out, do not include polygamy.

Are you surprised by some of the reaction to this new film, that the one thing people say is how much of a departure it is for you? How do you deal with it?

It’s sort of a you-can’t-win situation. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with it, but I’m comfortable knowing it. It’s difficult to think of “Possession” as a departure when I’ve done so few films. The first two were so steadfastly one way. “Nurse Betty” was different from the first two, and that was surprising. This one is a surprising move away from that again. I guess it shows the breadth of my interests, that it’s wide-ranging in terms of what I might do as a director. The writing I’ve done and continue to do remains pretty constant. I guess it’s more surprising to people from a directing sense.

Why did you want to make this particular film?

I read the book and I loved it. I enjoyed the twin engines that it worked on, and in a very intellectual way. I thought it was well-written, and emotionally I felt very satisfied. It had a great ending, which is often the thing you carry around. Endings are hard to do, in books, films, whatever it is — they’re hard to get right. When you do see one that works for you, you often think of the book on those terms.

At some point, during a relatively brief career, I asked my agent about who held the rights to it. I’ve been an Anglophile for a long time, and I’ve been both a student and a teacher, so most of the elements of the book were appealing to me. I hadn’t done anything in period — I had onstage — but I hadn’t done anything on film that would test me that way. And I’m always looking for a test, a risk.

Was it a good risk?

Sure, it paid off in the sense that I feel like what I set out to do was accomplished. Tackling the period from two points of view, that is a very immediate thing to me. It’s not precious. These people don’t know they’re in a period film, they’re just alive, and feeling these emotions. You want to get the manners and the mores right — the look of the hat, all of those things — but it would be a pretty hollow exercise if that’s all you cared about, was to get the carriages going in the right direction. You have to make the emotional points. That’s what really interested me. And the two separate relationships.

And that’s the through line, that’s the line I used to sell myself to Warner Brothers initially: “Look, I may not be the obvious choice for this material, but I think I’m a good one because it’s about two sets of people who are in love and in relationships at least, and things happen to them where they’re emotionally tested. And I have continued to write about that, not just as a filmmaker, but as a playwright, sometimes as a short story writer.”

You can always hire people to do the rest. You can hire a costume designer. But believe me, you don’t want just costumes. You really want to believe in the predicaments of these people. [Warner Bros.] seemed to believe that and I set about doing it. Also, there are a couple of highly questionable nasty boys along the way, who seem to fit my interests. Not that I look for stories with just bad men — they just happen to show up.

How much convincing did it take with the studio?

It took a bit of dancing and singing, and I don’t sing and dance well. It was the volume, I think, of singing and dancing. It really exponentially grows from the kind of project it is, to how much money the project is going to cost. Had this been a little small endeavor, relatively small compared to a studio’s thinking, there probably wouldn’t be as much hand-wringing about it as for, say, something that’s $25 million.

It’s a bigger investment, so there’s more curiosity, more interest about it. It either happens or it doesn’t. You just hope for the best. In this case, Warner Bros. said yes, but they wanted to work with another studio and split the costs. That was their safety valve. Another safety valve, I’m sure, was the casting of Gwyneth Paltrow. That made complete sense to them. On all the fronts we could come up with — period film, romantic film, someone who’s done a dialect, someone who’s had success at the box office, has personal success — all of those things were green lights.

What was it like adapting a book for film?

It was hard. At the base of it, it was a book I respected as a fan. And you have a living author that you don’t want to let down. I didn’t want her to look at it and go, “Well what was it about it that you loved? Because you decimated it. I recognize the title.”

The book had been optioned about 10 years before I started at Warner Bros. We had the benefit of where everybody else had gone before. But the key was seeing this series of notes, from A.S. Byatt, in response to earlier drafts of other writers. For someone who doesn’t write screenplays, she seemed to really know what a movie was. She was able to say, “Look, it can’t be like the book; Roland cannot be the same kind of character that he was on the page of the book.”

We wanted to be, not reverential, but certainly respectful of the book. And yet we knew there were great episodes that would be lost and characters who would not exist any longer. The mandate was sort of to get the spirit of the thing. Of course you just want to make a good movie that people enjoy, but for that next layer of people who have read the novel, you want them to say, “Yeah, they got it.” That’s pretty key.

There are such rabid fans of the book, that even during production, I was getting e-mails (how they got my e-mail I don’t know; it speaks to their tenacity) questioning my choices. It becomes a bit of a bible to them. So if it’s different than on the page, they say it’s wrong. Whereas A.S. Byatt was much more open to changes.

When it comes to working in theater and film, do you have a preference? Do you feel more comfortable in one than the other?

I don’t tend to get bored with one and then do the other; it’s just that I like them both. I always liked movies but never studied them or how to do it. I always imagined myself doing theater. I think film, which I haven’t done for very long, has afforded me the chance to go back and do theater. I like that so much that I can’t imagine a time where I would not want to do it. Whereas the pressure of film, I can see where people take periods of time away from it, because there are just so many other demands on you, beyond the elements that you really like. I like working on the script, I like working with the actors. There are so many technical demands that I am just still learning about and the less you know the harder it is to keep up.

The big difference between theater and film for me, and what makes theater so attractive, is the very clean delineation of purpose. In the theater there is a very delineated time in which the process takes place, and in the end of that, it’s all culminating in the product. So you know the pressure of, “We’re opening six weeks from now, so we need to do X.” It’s all very concentrated on the elements that I handle. Like, “Let’s sit around and rehearse the script.” Then we add on the costumes and all. You’ve got just the last few days to deal with that, costumes and lighting.

In film, there is no such demarcation. The first day of the film you’re filming. You may have a little rehearsal and preproduction, but that’s not the process, that’s part of it. When you go to work, and you’re setting up the lighting and all of that, then at some point during the day you have to film and that’s the product. That raw footage you took on day one is going to end up in the film. So you have to be as good on day one as you are on day 60. That’s a little more pressure, I think, for everyone. It’s like, “I know this is a really hard scene, but we have to film it today because we lose so and so on Thursday. Even though it’s kind of the climax of your relationship, we’re going to have to film that right away, and so off you go.” I find that a little more daunting.

The stakes are higher in film?

Not the personal stakes. But the stakes are made to feel higher because there’s more money involved. So more people are constantly around watching their investment. There’s no question about that. Even if it’s not hands-on, you just feel the presence of people watching what you’re doing, which I completely understand. If I were making an investment like that I would be a little curious as well. They’re not going to say, “What the hell, let’s just give you $20 million and see what comes of it.” That is just not the way it is handled.

When you’re in the theater, you’re talking about thousands of dollars usually. I don’t believe it’s just monetary, but I can’t imagine it’s just a trust issue either. Because the theater people that I’ve worked with I don’t know any better than the film people, but they tend to stay away and come to previews.

When you talk about yourself as a filmmaker, you speak as though you’re a novice.

There are so many elements in film — I’m a quick learner, but I think I’m constantly learning technical things that you never face in the theater. You don’t edit, you don’t do sound mixes, you don’t do computer-generated effects. For the most part they’re very different disciplines. Do I think I’m any better at one than the other? Not necessarily.

I’m probably more comfortable as a writer than as a director, because I’ve done it longer. I feel more comfortable at it, just the experience of it. I imagine myself capable of any number of things. I don’t think most people would have expected this film to come from me, just in terms of scope, the fact that it’s period.

You’ve said about your work — in theater and film — that you try to challenge people’s sensibilities. Does that involve challenging your own sensibilities?

I think I’m the first audience, so I challenge myself by extension of openly challenging others. When I write and I don’t know where I’m going and it surprises me when it comes out — I look back on a few pages I’ve written and go, “Yeah, strange monologue to come up with” — that’s a really pleasing thing. An audience is pleased in the same way. They can look at something and say, “Wow, I had no idea where that story was going.”

The positive responses to a film like, say, “Nurse Betty,” were more geared in that direction. There are so many elements to that screenplay and the way that film was made. You can recognize it as a road picture, satire and soap opera, and it’s got philosophical killers — but I never knew exactly where it was going to end up.

The surprise of the journey is important to me. In the same way that the pleasure of the process is important to me. It’s sort of a buyer’s market in casting people and in hiring crew — there are so many people with talent at a certain level, that you can kind of pick really carefully. But I’m very curious about and interested in getting people who I think will be a pleasure to work with. It’s not worth it to say, “Well, we made a great film, but it was just hell.” I’m not so into suffering that it just doesn’t matter if I suffer personally for a year as long as the movie is good. I think one can do both; they can enjoy the process and make a substantial product.

Audiences, and critics, consider personal details, like the fact that you’re a Mormon, when evaluating your work. Is that fair?

I don’t know why it should be an issue. I can say that obviously, being a Mormon has an influence, as much influence as being a man or being of the political persuasion that I am, or being born in this part of the century. It does not have undue influence on me.

I do find [people's fascination] curious. It’s often writers. Often with the writer it’s the first thing they’ve considered about me. “Well, this is what a Mormon is supposed to be, and yet this guy is writing this and he calls himself a Mormon and that seems like an odd thing.” So they just want to not even justify it but make sense of it to themselves. But the end result of that is me getting asked that a lot. And me getting over it.

You’re a practicing Mormon?

Well, yeah. I need more practice, apparently. I’m still a Mormon. I had some difficulty with a play I wrote called “Bash,” and I was dis-fellowshipped from the church because of that play, which is not like being excommunicated. One is still in the church, and can go to services, but can’t take the sacrament — there’s a certain set of things that come with that. As long as I don’t write bad things again, I might get back into their good graces.

Maybe we’re just curious about it because we don’t really understand what it means to be Mormon. What do you think we misunderstand about it?

I guess the polygamy question, which I still get. Someone just asked that question this weekend, like, “Can you have more wives if you wanted, do you still endorse that?” So sure, there’s a certain, not even mystique, there’s a mysteriousness with the church. It is probably the only American religion that was founded in America, that I’m aware of. That may be the case.

I think the questions have less to do with Mormonism than [the fact that] I’m meant to be part of an organization that is supposed to be sort of righteous and all of this, and then I write fairly unrighteous characters. So how do I rectify that, how does the church feel about that?

Will you continue to look at relationships, the dynamics of relationships in your work?

I would be hard-pressed to say that I ever plan to get away from the examination of relationships. One of my favorite filmmakers is Eric Rohmer. The way things go in and out of style, he’s incredibly constant about the way in which he shoots, what he’s interested in. For the most part, his films are very simple meditations on the kind of quiet craziness that men and women have toward one another.

I quite firmly believe that he imagines, no matter how many films he makes about that, he’ll never get it completely — not right, but he’ll just never corner the market on what there is to say about that. I have been able to find plenty of reasons to continue writing about that. There are a couple of projects out there that are certainly different on the surface, but my inherent interest remains very much rooted in how people deal with one another.

LaBute’s “Possession” takes significant liberties with Byatt’s novel — chief among them, he has made the story’s male romantic lead, the impoverished academic researcher Roland Michell (played by Aaron Eckhart), an American instead of a student-poor Englishman. Several minor characters have been excised completely, and the novel’s somewhat mannered dialogue (which is appropriate to the book’s characters and works nicely on the page) has been very loosely adapted to make it swing — in other words, it has been smoothed and streamlined and perhaps, at times, too neatly patted into effective movie speech.

But LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn’t be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it’s a humble picture, a movie that isn’t afraid to be an entertainment. The subtitle of Byatt’s book is “A Romance,” and LaBute clearly uses that term as his touchstone. Straightforward and old-fashioned in the best possible senses of both those words, “Possession” is a movie that puts itself squarely in the service of the lovers who inhabit it.

The intricacies of Byatt’s narrative sometimes means those characters aren’t the easiest masters to serve. “Possession” is about two pairs of lovers, one from the past and one from the present, whose stories are woven into one thick golden plait: The first pair are the (fictitious) Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel Lamotte (Jennifer Ehle), whose illicit affair comes to light when Roland finds a lost love letter tucked between the pages of an old book. The second pair are Roland himself and Dr. Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow), scholars who are devoted to the study of these poets and who set off on a search for clues about their secret connection, falling in love reluctantly and tentatively themselves.

LaBute, with the help of his fellow screenwriters David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) and Laura Jones (“High Tide,” “The Portrait of a Lady”), succeeds in streamlining Byatt’s intricate plot without unbraiding it completely; he seems to have grasped the urgency of preserving the spirit of Byatt’s rich language and multilayered, poetic details, while intuiting the potential dangers of getting lost in its misty quagmires.

But best of all, with “Possession” LaBute offers us one of the most delectable surprises of moviegoing: He has defied our expectations. I’ve never been a fan of LaBute’s movies. The things his defenders like about him — what they see as his “edginess,” humor or absolute modernity — I have perceived as a strained and pretentious sanctimoniousness; he has had a tendency to condescend to his characters, the better to make audiences feel good about themselves in the cheapest, easiest fashion.

In “In the Company of Men,” in which two slick middle-management types cruelly seduce a beautiful deaf woman just for sport, LaBute used his characters as programmed voiceboxes for his prefab views on sexual politics, devising an elaborately contrived situation to prove what scumbags men can be. (If they’re such scumbags by nature, why does he need so much contrivance to prove it?) “Nurse Betty” purportedly entreated us to share one woman’s feel-good delusional daydream, but it was really an invitation for would-be sophisticates to laugh at her dopey middle-American hopes and motivations.

Hardcore LaBute fans may find “Possession” an oddity at the very least and a betrayal of his talents at worst. But “Possession” marks the first time LaBute has wrapped a picture in any kind of warmth — which may sound strange, considering it’s a very carefully made picture that is at least partly about English reserve and caution when it comes to love. But in some ways, the sleek warmth of “Possession” is more immediately appealing than the burled wordiness of the book. (Byatt’s book is brilliant, but it contains a few too many examples of the author’s pitch-perfect re-creations of Victorian-era poetry — she works what starts out as a wonderful, gorgeous, multi-hued tapestry of a joke into a threadbare carpet.)

One of Byatt’s subjects in “Possession” (she gets around to it eventually and indirectly) is the inedequacy of words to plumb the depths of real passion. LaBute puts that idea squarely at the center of his movie, showing us how Maud and Roland negotiate their love gingerly and cautiously, while the Victorians, after testing the waters with a few carefully phrased letters, plunge right in. Because they know the full power of words, the poets are more hardnosed about the limitations of those words; the academics, on the other hands, know only words — signifiers of feelings instead of, as the Victorian poets would have had it, messengers that allow those feelings to take wing.

That’s a fairly subtle idea for a motion picture, but LaBute gently and unobtrusively guides his performers to the heart of it. Paltrow’s Maud Bailey is a crisp, no-nonsense academic at a small English university who seems to be making her way through her life and her work with an efficient clickety-clack — her specialty is women’s studies, and the poems of Christabel LaMotte are a special interest, partly because Bailey herself is distantly related to the poet.

Eckhart’s Roland (whose specialty in this his-and-hers mix is the poet Ash) is much further down on the academic food chain — he’s a lowly researcher who’s constantly short of funds. He contacts Maud, seeking her advice and counsel on the secret love letter he’s found. When she meets him at the train station, the first we see of her is a pair of extremely soft, extremely tasteful and extremely expensive low-heeled black boots: Maud Bailey is not one of those stereotypically scattered, frizzy-haired, mother-hen academics, but one whose approach to everything she does is as tightly wound and controlled as her long golden hair, which is always (for reasons the movie, like the book, explains) wrapped in a tight little bun.

Paltrow plays Maud with so much coolness that she holds us, and not just Roland, at arm’s length for much of the movie. But it’s what makes the gradual, almost pointillistic way in which she opens up to Roland that much more believable. Eckhart, in a beautifully shaded performance, plays Roland not as an unlikably brash American but as a ruggedly expressive one — in other words, the kind of American who isn’t distasteful to Englishpeople but who is still decidedly and unequivocally foreign. Badly shaven, his hair perpetually standing up as if he’s just yanked a polo-neck over his head, he’s so raffish and casual that you almost wonder how he found his way into the midst of all these English academics and their flowery poets to begin with.

But as Eckhart reveals them to us, Roland’s most deeply American qualities serve the story precisely. That he’s a stranger in a strange land (his dedication as an academic makes him belong in this setting, but his Americanness sets him forever apart) is a metaphor for how foreign we sometimes feel to ourselves when we’re falling in love.

Eckhart and Paltrow play their gradual coming together with a kind of prickly unease that’s both frustrating and pleasurable, as well as wholly believable. Paltrow may be one of those rare American actresses who’s more believable as an Englishwoman: Her slow, reserved smile, and that shy and coltish way she has of bowing her head (like a girl who believes she’s too tall to pass through any doorway), are the qualities that make her most touching here.

Roland and Maud’s meeting is the beginning of an adventure in which they track down the complete cache of letters exchanged between Christabel and Ash (she is always referred to by her first name, and he by his last). Their search for the truth of the poets’ relationship is hampered by Sir George (Graham Crowden), a crotchety old man who believes the letters belong to him; Cropper (Trevor Eve, in a performance that’s both suitably oily and dried-out), an acquisitive American academic who’s more interested in the trappings of Ash’s life than in his actual work; and Roland’s boss, Blackadder (Tom Hickey), a scattered but benign scholar who has buried himself in the minutiae of Ash’s life and letters.

It must have been LaBute’s intention that the sections of the movie dealing with Christabel and Ash are the most vivid and most deeply romantic. Northam, who can be wonderful or woodenly self-conscious, is at his best here — he shields his poet’s heart with a businesslike Victorian reserve, but he always lets you hear it beating. And Ehle’s Christabel is quietly sensational: With her prim smile and mischievously glittering eyes, she captures the essence of a difficult and intelligent woman who freely chooses a passionate and open life, fully aware that it’s bound to bring her only sorrow.

Their scenes together are less uneasily electric than those between Eckhart and Paltrow — the current between them is more like rushing water than the sizzle (or fizzle) of connecting wires. They’re the picture of a certain romantic ideal that’s wholly organic in its perfection and intensity — but even if, technically, they’re human stand-ins for the lushest ideas of the Victorian age, the movie makes sure we believe in them as people, too.

LaBute — an American and a Mormon — approaches England as a polite outsider, and it works. Parts of the picure are set in Yorkshire, and LaBute and cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier offer us an affectionate and clear-eyed view of the English countryside and its people. In one of the movie’s most understated jokes, a crisp young Yorkshire innkeeper patiently listens to Roland and Maud’s protestations that they’re colleagues and simply must have separate rooms by responding drily, “I’m sure it’s more complicated than I can imagine.”

LaBute’s production designer, Luciana Arrighi (“Howard’s End”), gives us settings drenched in rich, muted plums and browns, occasionally shot through with golden Pre-Raphaelite touches. And LaBute finds simple, breathtakingly effective ways of connecting the Victorian-era story with the present-day one: As Roland and Maud rush down a country road in a modern car and disappear from view, a 19th-century locomotive puffs into sight along the ridge above them, headed in the opposite direction.

“Possession” is the type of richly resonant movie that Karel Reisz should have made from John Fowles’ ominously vibrant and romantic “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” but didn’t. LaBute approaches his material both intelligently and intuitively, fully aware of the idea that a movie version of a novel is always a newly created world.

That can be a thankless job for any filmmaker. When it comes to bringing books to the screen, the critic Robin Wood has noted, “There is no such thing as a faithful adaptation.” According to Wood, the idea of faithful adaptation implies that “film is the inferior art, and should be content (or even proud) to reproduce precisely what it can never hope to reproduce: the movement of the author’s words on paper.”

LaBute knew he couldn’t represent that movement, and didn’t even try. Instead, he chose to work in a kind of vernacular shorthand that feels modern and emotionally direct — he doesn’t shrink from passion where it’s called for.

As Roland and Maud, making up after a tiff and moving closer to enjoying their first real kiss as lovers (there has been an earlier one, but it doesn’t really count), Roland looks at her intently and explains, “I just want to see if there’s an ‘us’ in ‘you and me.’”

In the audience I saw the movie with, a few people tittered, perhaps embarrassed by the sheer “movieness” of the line. But for Roland and Maud, in so many ways more constricted than their Victorian counterparts, the line is its own kind of fervent and deeply felt poetry — a sentence that’s Victorian in timbre if not in eloquence. By the end of the movie, Maud and Roland have fallen in love slowly, carefully, tentatively, as modern lovers so often do, negotiating every possible contingency and pitfall in advance. They may be less tortured than their Victorian friends, and yet somehow they’re sadder for not being able to rush at love headlong.

Even so, we walk away from the movie with some fragile hopefulness for their future. Christabel and Ash may have had a love that extended beyond the grave, but in life, it took months and torrents of words before they found the courage to touch fingertips. Even timeless love has to start out tentatively, shakily — maybe that’s the jarring needed to set the clock’s hands in perpetual motion.

Is it possible for someone who loves the earlier novel to also savor this book, which is its antidote — or, I suspect Byatt believes, its cure? Yes, but it will take a flexible and unsentimental reader. “The Biographer’s Tale” is as inventive, playful, brainy and wonderfully written as “Possession,” perhaps even more so, but it’s a bit like a plain, sardonic younger sister overshadowed by her sunny, beautiful older sibling; it’s less charming, but more honest, and in its own way just as good company.

The biographer of the title is Phineas G. Nanson, a British postgraduate student who realizes, in the midst of a lecture on Empedocles and Lacan, that he has had enough. He decides to turn away from post-structuralist theory to pursue “a life full of things … full of facts.” Those two terms are carefully chosen, for to the fastidious Phineas, whole territories of thought and vocabulary have been declared off limits: His theoretical training has taught him to eschew such words as “real,” “identify” and “persons.” By the end of his adventures, however, he will consider himself “addicted to forbidden words, words critical theorists can’t use and writers can.”

The key to Phineas’ escape, the source of those salutary facts, is Scholes Destry-Scholes, a scholar who in the 1950s wrote a three-volume biography of one of those astonishing Victorian polymaths — an explorer, master of disguise, diplomat, soldier, naturalist, linguist, historian and bon vivant who knocked off a few novels whenever he wasn’t otherwise engaged. Phineas’ advisor persuades him to become the biographer’s biographer, and Byatt’s tale is set in motion. In the course of pursuing the elusive Destry-Scholes, Phineas will become entangled with an earthy female bee taxonomist and an ethereal X-ray technician; get a job at Puck’s Girdle, a fantastical travel agency run with “a Fourieriste ambition to cater to all tastes,” according to one of its gay proprietors; tangle with a sinister gentleman who wants to see just how far that Fourieriste philosophy will extend in the arrangement of “special” holidays; and discover two caches of enigmatic documents written by his even more enigmatic subject.

The first cache, excitingly enough, includes biographical writings on three unnamed men, whose identities Phineas eventually decodes (a legendary naturalist, a less well-known one and a playwright — all genuine historical figures, by the way). However, each of the biographical fragments contains certain fabrications, all of a particular nature. Then there’s the box of index cards and photographs Destry-Scholes left behind (along with a pouch of beautiful antique marbles) before he disappeared in the vicinity of the Maelstrom, a whirlpool off the coast of Norway.

“The Biographer’s Tale” simmers with ideas, including forays into some of Byatt’s abiding preoccupations — insects, sadism, the Victorians, utopianism and “In Memoriam,” Tennyson’s orgy of poeticized grief; it’s a feast for the mind without ever losing its momentum as a story. The book’s prevailing questions, however, concern the possibility of ever understanding the dead, particularly if they preferred to remain unknowable. (Phineas can’t even locate a photograph of Destry-Scholes.) In writing about his quest, Phineas tries mightily to avoid the sin of autobiography, a form he considers “repulsive. I was brought up as a child to believe in self-effacement, and as a student to believe in impersonality.” All the while, of course, he is ferociously stamping his own character onto the book with statements like that one.

“The Biographer’s Tale” won’t leave most readers with the gratifying sense of closure granted by “Possession,” and it isn’t exactly a love story either; there’s plenty of sex but no great romance. It’s a rigorous novel that refuses to coddle us and warm our hearts, but at the same time it lavishes riches upon its readers. So perhaps it’s fitting that “The Biographer’s Tale” is about giving up not just literary criticism but literature itself; it’s Byatt’s most heartfelt paean to the natural sciences. “The too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it,” writes Phineas (though, please note, he’s still writing). “It is all we have.” The final, sly irony in that is how it took such a sumptuously literary novel to tell us so.