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As narrated in the Gospel of John, Jesus launched his ministry at a wedding in the village of Cana, home of newly recruited disciple Nathanael. The nuptials were a merry affair: When the wine ran out, Mary complained to her son, who, through a flick of hand or staff, transformed six stone jars of water into a fine vintage. This early miracle isn’t quite a showstopper like the feeding of the 5,000 or Lazarus’s resurrection, but it does make a point; it’s often interpreted as an affirmation of marriage and the bond between Jesus and his church.

Jump ahead to Massachusetts, 1730: another Cana, another Nathaniel, another, less celebratory take on conjugal love. In his affecting if contrived first novel, “All the World Beside,” Garrard Conley evokes the clash of religion and romance as two married men grapple with same-sex attraction and its consequences on their strait-laced community. Yearning for a utopia, the Rev. Nathaniel Whitfield has “carved” a town from the wilderness, settling his congregation and family — depressive wife Catherine, stoic daughter Sarah, infant Ezekiel — into routines dictated by worship and his travels to nearby Stockbridge. By Cana standards the Whitfields are well-to-do, eclipsed only by the physician Arthur Lyman, his spouse, Anne, and their 10-year-old daughter, Martha, arrivals from Boston. Their fates gradually entwine: Nathaniel and Arthur are drawn to each other, even coupling once just before Ezekiel’s conception, birthing the fantasy that together they’ve parented the boy through the vessel of Catherine’s body. Arthur is convinced Ezekiel resembles him, stirring a profound connection.

Conley’s men, then, are virile and sensitive, his women overworked and discerning. Sarah discovers that her father has taken the baby out in the middle of the night, trailing them to a clearing where Arthur waits to cuddle the child and embrace his lover. She recoils in horror: “Sin lives in her own home.” From this moment “All the World Beside” unspools its fable of passion in the shadows, faith and its many furies. Although the plot seems trite, Conley paces it well.

The men vow to keep their relationship platonic, and yet urges flare, rendered in a decorative prose. “When he is near his friend, even in public, he feels himself drawn in,” Conley writes of Nathaniel, “magnetized by the pull that makes him want to run his fingers over every part of the man, commit to memory every dip and dimple, every blemish. The knowledge of this man’s body: a kind of gnostic scripture. The touch: an exquisite burning.” Conley foregrounds their sexual awakening, but he’s equally attuned to the spiritual Awakening spreading like a wildfire across New England. When the Awakening blazes into Cana, it’s more sinister than sacred, stalking children and adults alike; the hysteria of the Salem witch trials, one character notes, had occurred just four decades earlier. Conley, whose memoir, “Boy Erased,” recounted the cruelties and hypocrisies of evangelical conversion therapy, knows all too well the menace of magical thinking.

Ezekiel seeks a freedom that evades his “two fathers.” As a toddler he fords a river while Catherine naps on the shore. “Geese hunt the grassy banks for food, their long necks folding upon themselves in one easy fluid motion, the water beside them moving in tandem … he steps closer to the shore, shoes sinking into mud. He kicks them off.” Tragedy is averted, or merely deferred, when Catherine wakes and rescues her son. Ezekiel intuits that he’s different from other boys, mute, more comfortable dressed in a woman’s shift than in breeches. As the Awakening unfolds in Cana, pent-up energies burst forth.

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Conley is guilty of “presentism,” the framing of past events and people through the lens of contemporary concerns: At times I felt I was watching a play — a kinder, gentler cousin to Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” with allusions to “The Scarlet Letter” by a third Nathaniel, Hawthorne — rather than entering a fully realized world. But the novel’s assured rhythm enhances the interior struggles of Conley’s characters. While the institution of marriage — the wax and wane of enduring commitment — is on trial here, the author approaches it with a gravitas and compassion egregiously absent from recent divorce memoirs.

In the aftermath of a crisis, Ezekiel accompanies Arthur on his rounds, scribbling quotes and sketching images of Cana, a wink to Conley’s method: “The first touch of chalk to paper must be decisive; it must speak to the intention of the artist. . . . The square is the only element that is truly kept square … a bit of geometry invisible unless one traces its shape from the other buildings. The white cross at its center Ezekiel renders as a mere smudge, a hazy Star of Bethlehem seeming to hang over the space.” A choice haunts him: a life of repressed emotions or exile? Conley joins a cadre of literary writers — Daniel Mason and Lauren Groff among them — who look backward to make sense of present-day conflicts. “All the World Beside” suggests that our Puritan legacy still molds us, as marriage equality remains fragile and authoritarian forces rattle their sabers.

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of “This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn.

All the World Beside

By Garrard Conley

Riverhead. 352 pp. $28

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