One of the blurbs on the back of Ron Carlson’s outstanding new novel, “Five Skies” (Viking, 244 pages, $23.95), makes the claim that “it’s going to make a beautiful blockbuster film.” That seems fairly plausible to me, but the movie is not one I’d expect to like. “Five Skies” puts three prickly men together on top of a plateau in Idaho for an odd carpentry project; together they work, and gradually open up to one another. The movie would be like “Brokeback Mountain” without its active ingredient.

What makes the book excellent is Mr. Carlson’s description of work. Arthur Key, a “street engineer” who made his fortune working on Hollywood sets, brings an element of genius to the project — an Evel Knievel-style ramp, built at the lip of a remote gorge. It’s an undertaking that, in its artificiality and its scale, calls to mind an epic quest.

Mr. Carlson’s virtuosity breaks down the divide between the socalled novel of information and the novel of the moral life. Description becomes action, and character follows, amid the moral resonances of carpentry. When Ronnie, the untrained scamp, nearly drives a road grader over the gorge’s edge, Darwin Gallegos, the subdued foreman, tries to haul the grader back onto terra firma with a simple towing procedure. But the grader’s blade — the piece of steel that levels roads — has driven itself into the earth. “I’m f****** everything right up,” Ronnie moans. Arthur Key hammers together a wedge, something that will act as a fulcrum, to lift up the blade while the back of the grader is pulled backward.

He knew he was guessing at the angle. If it was too acute, the whole thing would act as a brake, stop the tow, and possibly propel the old machine farther over the gorge. If it was too wide, it could simply slip and something he couldn’t see would happen.

Just following the action, here, is an aesthetic delight, a species of ekphrasis, like reconstituting the shield of Achilles in your mind while reading Homer. The problem with Mr. Carlson’s novel is that these truly exciting passages are made to seem slow, next to signposted moments of confession and male bonding that scoot Mr. Carlson’s plot forward.

We read that Darwin mentions his wife “in a voice that Arthur had not heard before.” And Arthur decides to tell Darwin his own story — about the betrayal and death of his kid brother — during a long car ride. The interlocking reticence and curiosity these men share clatters through the first part of this novel, until the momentum of a broadening plot — bringing in the local townspeople — carries the material of this novel beyond the rudiments of its frame.

At one point, on a visit to town, Arthur Key encounters a receptionist working on a real estate correspondence course:

Key looked at her — a woman in a brown sweater who was probably thirty-two years old — from the distance from which he witnessed all the useless commerce of the world and he felt the dark open under him as she stood and came around the dreadful display of written material on the counter.

“Five Skies” is in large part about the positive excellence of Key’s work, and his corresponding skepticism about everything else — including his own soul. It’s a typical male story. What makes Mr. Carlson’s book stand out is the authority with which he re-creates Key’s construction work on the page. The novelist acts just as abruptly about feelings as the carpenter does, but both are excellent craftsmen.

***

The strange thing about Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” is that it is so full of ideas. Ostensibly a walk in the woods, the book is a cornucopia of literary quotations and big ideas. Stylistically, metaphor rushes in on literal description, just as theodicy rushes in on the observation of a frog’s death.

In an essay, “Contemporary Prose Styles,” Ms. Dillard has written that prose can be divided into two camps, “plain-speaking” and “fine writing.” In that same essay, she noted that simple writing is often deployed to cover rural themes and humble characters. Her mission, then, would be to write finely about the same subjects.

In “The Maytrees” (Harper Collins, 224 pages, $24.95), the second novel in Ms. Dillard’s long career, she strikes a balance between naïveté and culture by setting her story among eccentrics on Cape Cod. But the “fine writing” that obtains would be inappropriate in any milieu:

When Primo Dial and his concertina left her that May for winsome twins who played glockenspiels, she cried the whole of a Provincetown summer. She fed her love willfully on forcemeats and tidbits from their strolling player days and dancing nights she knew by heart.

This reads like a performance, it sounds like it was made up as the sentence went along, and assonance and melody obtain at the cost of imaginative integrity. There are some fine moments in this book, but they are smothered by bad style.

blytal@nysun.com