Though the time and place of The Truest Pleasure are as remote from contemporary American life as mountains are from strip malls, its illumination of the tantalizing nature of marriage is timeless and universal. Ginny Peace marries Tom Powell at the turn of the century (after her family has given up on her ever marrying), and Tom moves in to work Ginny's family's isolated mountain farm.

Truth be known - and they both know it - their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own. Ginny knows she can't manage her aging father's farm by herself. There is also mutual attraction, and indeed their "loving" is deeply gratifying. What keeps getting in the way of it, however, are their obsessions.

Tom's is easy to understand: he's a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny's is less predictable: she's a dedicated "holy roller," blissfully transported by Pentecostal preaching. That she speaks "in tongues," that she is "saved," seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. Theirs is a civil war of its own. But it's not until Ginny's adversary and husband lies unconscious and at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that she realizes what her truest pleasure has been.