Michelle Huneven's absorbing novel-cum-philosophical-journey Jamesland opens as Alice Black, the great-granddaughter of philosopher and pioneering psychologist William James, wakes in the middle of the night to find a pregnant deer in her Los Angeles home. She shoos the frightened, clattering creature out the door and across the lawn, and helps her elderly aunt back to bed. In the morning, however, she begins to wonder if she's hallucinating, exhibiting the first signs of a congenital neurosis–for one thing, her aunt was, at the time, asleep in a nursing home miles away. This odd experience launches Alice, an out-of-work biologist with a married boyfriend, on a reluctant quest to recover (or perhaps preserve) her sense of self. As Alice ponders deer symbolism, Helen Harland, the new minister at the local Unitarian Universalist church, looks for respite from the ongoing battle with her parishioners over a style of worship they find "too religious." The two women strike up a lopsided friendship, and Helen does her best to pull Pete Ross, a pudgy failed chef just out of Bellevue, into the circle. Helen playfully describes her congregation as "the variety show of religious experience," consciously echoing the title of James' most famous book. In tribute, Huneven adroitly arranges her characters into a tableau of fin-de-siècle spiritual types, from Catholic nuns to animal theologians to psychic researchers to secular humanists to Hollywood celebrities. A fictional exploration of the philosophy and psychology of religion sounds like a project that can go wrong in any number of frightening, boring, and pedantic ways. But Huneven performs a minor miracle with this material, eliciting the delicate drama of personal transformation without telegraphing some overarching moral. She allows her characters to show all their dimensions, then turns her spotlight to the mirror lurking in the corner, in another character's eyes. Alice is a dependent loner in her own mind, a skinny paranoid to Pete, and a needy seeker to Helen. It's a shock and a thrill to be led through one set of synapses, only to have the frame flicker and the perspective suddenly change to reveal a seemingly alien figure. Back at the turn of the 19th century, James drew overflow crowds to his lectures because of his sympathetic, inclusive, nonjudgmental analysis of spiritual modes and method: People felt that he validated their personal experiences by taking them seriously as data. Huneven, using a narrative rather than scientific mode (although James' style sometimes recalls that of his brother Henry), grants her characters the same respect. She traces the steps of their pilgrimages, and seems as surprised and delighted as they are by the appearance of their beautiful, unexpected, perfectly apt destinations.