Tessa Hadley, whose new novel comes in a pink wrapper, boasting comparisons to Anne Tyler, deserves different treatment. Without writing as tautly as Ms. Tyler, or taking a narrative stance quite as superior, Ms. Hadley shows herself to be a more sympathetic, immersive writer, more Alice Munro than Rachel Cusk.

Indeed, hints at literary ambition litter “The Master Bedroom” (Henry Holt, 339 pages, $26). Her heroine, a vinegary Slavic scholar named Kate, complains that “Nothing written now has enough in it.” Perhaps Ms. Hadley would include herself in this sweeping condemnation. Another character’s comment, that of the serious, doctorly David, seems more pertinant. He’s thinking about Chekhov: “Kate had recently lent him translations of some of the stories; the characters mostly seemed to grind unhappily against one another, locked in misunderstanding.” That grind could describe Ms. Hadley’s characters as well.

No one in contemporary England — or Wales, in Ms. Hadley’s case — would write exactly like Chekhov, of course. The misunderstandings that open between her characters have less to do with class or miserable circumstance than with the missed connections of a sexually liberated middleclass. Hers are people passing through the revolving door of desire and indecision; they get to travel back and forth and end up happy.

Reading through her new collection of stories, “Sunstroke” (Henry Holt, 339 pages, $26), it is very common to find a practical person trying to romance a dreamy person. Even if they are both academics, as in “Mother’s Son,” one is a Marxist and one is a feminist, and the feminist, in Ms. Hadley’s understandable choice, is the practical one. Soon enough, however, the Marxist’s abstractions becomes a kind of super-seriousness, and the earnest feminist gets to call him a prig. The dreamy persons, through the exigencies of idealistic effort, become a little ruthless, and the practical people fall back, relieved, on the bed of dreams.

We are all, Ms. Hadley’s stories suggest, on the same carousel. Some of the characters in “The Master Bedroom” get to go around several times, in the course of the novel. It begins with a symbol — a swan that falls from the air into oncoming traffic. Kate, the Chekhov translator, tells herself, in the novel’s opening sentence, that “It was not a sign. Kate refused to let it be a sign.”

Suzie, however, whose car the swan actually hits and destabilizes, definitely believes it is a sign. She believes the swan is her husband’s first wife, who threw herself from a balcony years ago. And Suzie runs with this intuition. She becomes a romantic, taking up with New-Agey friends and leaving her husband, David, the public health official, baffled.

Suzie’s romanticism is shallow, and Ms. Hadley encourages the reader’s contempt. When, in a shoddy gesture, Suzie volunteers to accompany David to one of his regular classical music concerts, she refuses to enjoy it and leaves at intermission. David, “his heart dancing with rage,” leaves the concert hall with Kate, who happens to be an old friend of his sister’s.

Their first drink together heralds the best of what’s in this book. Kate, not needing to like the performance as much as David, criticizes the costumes. David, sitting down for some precious, spontaneous companionship, is initially disappointed that Kate is eccentric, and requires adjustment from him. She, on the other hand, finds his expectations silly:

He looked so imperturbable, sitting perched on the edge of his chair in his suit and tie, with his knees apart, twirling his drink looking into his glass as if he never would unbend, frowning his disapproval of her thoughts on the oratorio.

The dueling seriousnesses of Kate and David become the engine of the book, while Suzie grows more and more foolish, offering the reader a cheap schadenfreude every time the narrative rolls over to her. David’s son, a remarkably balanced portrait of a smart, introverted teenager, also comes in, to draw out Kate’s romantic side, but it is the shot-countershot play of Kate and David that makes “The Master Bedroom” a keeper.

The explicit symbolism of the opening pages, meanwhile, fades into background noise: Ms. Hadley loves to mention “the persistent ticking of meltwater,” or the “agitating loud turmoil” of unexplained police helicopters. She even finds it valuable, when David comes home to an argument with Suzie, to mention that he has come from a meeting at a sports complex: “behind his concentration all day there had floated the liquid echo and splashings from a swimming pool and the thudding chock of balls, perhaps in a basketball court.”

At the novel’s end, all this suspended noise erupts in torrential rainfall, explicitly soaking through Kate’s “unsuitable” shoes. Kate and David, by this point, have been broken by love and its concomitant superstitions and hunches; they have become less intolerant toward symbols; they can be taken more seriously, for having become less so.