There is an exchange at the heart of Nightwoods, Charles Frazier's first novel in five years, that conveys, in what is almost an aside, the central argument of the novel. A man named Stubblefield, whose life has lain fallow for some time, comes into a surprise inheritance and visits his grandfather's lawyer to discuss how best to profit from his new estate, now that the main house has burned down:

 Uninsured, I'd bet, Stubblefield said.

 Yep. Too bad. Hate to see the historic structures go down. Our collective past, shallow though it is  But what you do is divide that parcel for vacation building lots. It's called progress.

 I thought progress meant things getting better, Stubblefield said.

Stubblefield is a character of clear if relatively simple values, an Everyman of sorts, but his life is about to become both murky and complicated. Blown back to his childhood home from a postwar America he doesn't much like, he meets the beautiful, unorthodox Luce, a woman whose innocence was taken from her so casually that her only recourse was to withdraw from society. Remembering her as the girl he had a crush on years before, he falls for her again. Luce, however, is cautious of outsiders in general and of men in particular and, though she finds Stubblefield attractive, the wooing is slow.

She also has two very damaged children to care for and, to win her, Stubblefield will have to win them too. The children, Dolores and Frank, are not hers; where Stubblefield has inherited a backwoods estate (which includes Luce's home) and some lakefront land, Luce has been obliged to take possession of these near-silent, almost feral creatures after her sister, Lily, was murdered. It is not a choice she would have made, had the state left her any other option: Luce is that American archetype, the post-Walden solitary in the woods, happiest when she is alone:

"What good does the world do you? That was the question Luce had asked herself for three years, and the answer she had arrived at was simple. A distressingly large portion of the world doesn't do you any good whatsoever. In fact, it does you bad. Casts static between your ears, drowns out who you truly are. So she tried to cull daily reality pretty harsh, retaining just landscape and weather and animals and the late-night radio."

Frazier is very good at the slow and nuanced process by which such emotionally thwarted, and justifiably suspicious, characters come together, but that meeting always happens against a backdrop of violence and social upheaval. The morally ambiguous postwar world Nightwoods inhabits is vividly drawn. Any film noir fan will recognise characters like Bud, Lily's no-good husband, and Lit, the brutalised veteran deputy with a fatal Benzedrine habit, and when they enter Luce's last-chance pastoral, we know no good can come of it.

The questions that emerge, however, are as central to how we live now as they were in the monochrome 50s. Frazier's central concern is how good people withstand moral decay, and the triumph of those who equate profit with progress. This goodness is embodied in Luce, and in her elderly neighbour, Maddie, a repository of local knowledge. Maddie's entire life seems to be "a nearly forgotten folkways practice from the past, but not the irretrievable past. Short of poisoning all life or blowing it up, people could keep doing it on and on, if they wanted to. Like when you're on the wrong road, you turn around and go back." In her struggle to bring up the damaged children she has inherited  and to live with her own ghosts  Luce looks to Maddie for confirmation of that continuing world, for "some seasonal lesson about time flowing forward pretty steady, and this day connected to all the others, and the years connected too. Not every day needing to stand all by itself and be its own apocalypse."

We are, perhaps, in risky, rather Matthew Arnold territory here (shades of "Dover Beach" and of the "strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims"), and we have to remember that withdrawal into backwoods seclusion is not enough: moral failure in the big bad world must be countered with mental fight, rather than passive rejection. At the close of Nightwoods, good has survived, but it is still haunted by ghosts; whatever happiness has been achieved subsists in a "doors locked, weapons close" siege state that leaves the old, essentially transcendentalist questions of withdrawal and social engagement still unresolved. This is as it should be, for order is not won once and for all, but must be striven for day by connected day, and the battle is as much with the natural inertia of our "good" selves as with the big bad world outside the narrow bounds of Arcadia.

John Burnside's Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape) has won this year's Forward prize for best collection.