There's no reason for high expectations when picking up a first novel, let alone a first novel devoted to the parallels among madness, the Holocaust, religious conversion, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But Martha Cooley's smart debut, The Archivist, defies a lot of sensible expectations. Her central plot is crammed with symbolism, inner meaning, and analogies, but Cooley makes it readable anyway. Sixtyish Matthais Lane, the first-person narrator throughout most of the book, is a mildly reclusive, mildly arrogant university librarian in charge of a vault full of valuable books and papers, including a sealed bequest of correspondence from Eliot to apparent soulmate Emily Hale. Roberta, a thirtyish graduate student, tries to evade Lane's guardianship of the Hale letters, inadvertently beginning a queasy relationship that Lane sees as a cleansing battle of wits, and that the reader may see as predatory stalking. Virtually everyone here has unresolved emotional problems stemming from parental betrayal, and all of them quote Eliot obsessively, but Cooley has such a deft, gentle touch with her characters that The Archivist is never as pretentious as its subjects. Cooley skims across heavily overused, overemotional themes from poetry to religion to jazz without trivializing them or wallowing in their greater significance. Even a bridge segment—the diary of Lane's Holocaust-obsessed wife Judith, which documents her descent into depression and suicide—is terse, emotive, and clever enough to overcome its inherently bathetic construction. Hollywood would yawn at this story, which keeps the romance firmly above the belt—in fact, generally well above the neckline. But then, Hollywood tends to like its love stories simple, happy, populist, and firmly based on comfortable clichés, and The Archivist is none of the above.