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This would be a wholly inaccurate assumption in the case of novelist Joanna Scott, former MacArthur fellow as well as Pulitzer Prize and PEN-Faulkner award nominee; the lofty critical affirmations of the literary establishment have little to do with the actual experience of reading one of her books. Scott is undeniably smart, but it's not her learned brain that rises full and glowing as Humpty Dumpty out of her fiction; it is instead her startlingly perceptive, fecund and appealing imagination that is the biggest thing about Scott.

Make Believe By Joanna Scott Little, Brown & Company, 224 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

In all of her six books, each wildly different from the others, Scott has a lapidary's instinct: She turns each story over as she would a raw gem, revealing its underside, magnifying every possible angle. Her multifaceted fictions gleam with real-world precision, so detailed that whatever universe she composes -- a 19th century slave ship, a rural estate in 1920s New York, artist Egon Schiele's fin-de-siecle Vienna, the interior landscape of a 4-year-old boy, a blind beekeeper's orchard -- appears solidly dimensional in the mind of the reader, quickened by a powerful narrative force.

But it isn't just Scott's settings that are believable. She's a double threat: a writer who has the breadth of imagination to detail even the most minute sensory qualities of her fictional setups, and who also specializes in shaping and dissecting characters who come across as quirkily and mysteriously human. Human behavior, with all its vagaries, its shadows and light, is her project, and her characters, no matter how peculiar or obsessed, are drawn with a compassionate and relentless curiosity. Scott writes of her beekeeper, the protagonist in a story from the 1994 collection "Various Antidotes": "With remarkable accuracy he could imagine the experiences of others ... he comprehended these in rich particularity. Perhaps empathy rather than imagination would better describe this skill." The same is true of Scott.

Scott's preoccupation with the spiritual development of individuals has grown more evident with each of her books. Her first novel, "Fading, My Parmacheene Belle," chronicles a furious flight by two haunted souls, one a 15-year-old runaway, the other an old fisherman whose ranting, book-long soliloquy is his tortured reconciliation to widowhood after 53 years of puzzling married life. The gruesome, wind-stalled journey of the slave ship in "The Closest Possible Union," Scott's second book, is also a metaphor for the moral journey of the novel's young narrator, a 14-year-old who is both the captain's apprentice and the son of the ship's owner.

In the prismatic "Arrogance," a fictionalized life of the Austrian expressionist painter Schiele, Scott creates a fragmentary structure informed by the artist's tormented self-portraits and scandalous career, thereby shaping a meditation on artistic genius, psychic struggle and societal imprisonment. The widely praised "Various Antidotes," arguably Scott's best-known work, explores the theme of scientific passion from the perspectives of characters whose obsessions drive them to grim extremes -- ranging from Charlotte Corday, who stabbed the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, to the Dutch inventor of an early microscope, who kisses his daughter "not like a father should kiss a daughter but like the devil kisses" in order to steal a tear and test his new invention.

In "The Manikin," Scott gave full rein to her natural gift for the strange and eccentric. A full-blown Gothic mystery, "The Manikin" is set in a rich taxidermist's gloomy, isolated mansion where each of the stranded characters is symbolically trapped in time, their lives as suspended as those of the stuffed creatures that line the halls. What links this novel to her latest, the newly published "Make Believe," and what sets both books apart from her earlier inventions, is a sustained authorial voice.

The novel opens with Bo, a 3-year-old boy and the pivot about whom the plot of "Make Believe" turns, hanging upside down from his seat belt following the car accident that has just killed his teenage mother, Jenny. Bo is now an orphan -- his gifted, teenage father, Kamon Gilbert, was shot and left to die on a sidewalk, a random act of violence that occurred two months before Bo's birth. After emergency surgery for a damaged spleen, Bo goes home with Kamon's parents, Erma and Sam Gilbert.

Bereaved over the death of their son but content to raise their grandson, who has been in their daily care since Jenny started a job, Erma and Sam see it as pure and simple chance when an ordinary day closes with food on the table and their family's good company instead of ending with tragedy. Similarly, Bo's parents had attributed to the randomness of chance -- it was neither good nor bad -- the fact that Jenny was white and Kamon black.

Jenny's stepfather, Eddie, however, saw Jenny's pregnancy and her black boyfriend as evidence of her intrinsic corruption and drove her out of the house where she grew up. It is when Jenny's passive mother, Marge, receives a huge bill for Bo's emergency surgery, a bill for the care of a grandchild she has never bothered to meet, that Scott's plot begins to take its full shape. The story's linchpin is Eddie, whose inflexible belief in his moral superiority -- and greedy desire for a spiritual test of his righteousness, conveniently dangling before him in the guise of a medical malpractice suit on behalf of Bo -- stirs him to press for the custody of a child for whom he has previously shown complete scorn.

Rather than the skittish, untrustworthy narrators or limited viewpoints of her earlier works, in "Make Believe," as in "The Manikin," we experience Scott's entire imagined vista through her own omniscient eyes. The scope of the world is described from the bottom of an ice-covered lake in midwinter -- its shifting light, its iron-colored water gelatinous with cold. It is also described from the viewpoint of Kamon, as he lies bleeding on a sidewalk after being fatally shot, his dying, stream-of-consciousness moments growing equally more hallucinatory, essential and dimmed as they tick past. And it is seen from the vantage of a monumental discovery in the consciousness of Bo as he first savors the "bitter pleasure of pity." Sent to his room in punishment for a misdeed, "he cried just thinking about himself crying, a sorry sight that would evoke, in memory, enough self-pity to sustain him for a lifetime."

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