Jonathan Rosen’s beautiful “Joy Comes in the Morning” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 400 pages, $25) is a novel that, in the tradition of the great American novel, brings the news. But the news, for once, is not old news. Mr. Rosen’s narrative is pinned on Deborah Green, a female rabbi with refreshing problems. “She was her most authoritative as a rabbi and her most insecure as a person, and the result was that she felt anxious and bitchy and depressed.”

The plot revolves around Deborah’s search for a boyfriend, but she has other worries. She broods on faith and personal discipline with a soliloquizing power derived from her habit of prayer. Her emotional attentiveness could entangle a lesser author, but Mr. Rosen writes about Judaica with an intimate control – as well as being a novelist, he is the author of a well-received examination of contemporary Judaism, “The Talmud and the Internet.”

When people get sick, or when they are in mourning, or when they face death, they often feel crazy when in fact they’re seeing reality very clearly, it’s just a different reality from the one they’re used to focusing on. Suddenly the routine of denial and habit doesn’t help them, it isn’t available anymore. Jewish tradition, for me, creates a kind of counter routine that doesn’t dissolve in a crisis.

Mr. Rosen doesn’t depict Deborah just in her mind but establishes her in a very engaging Manhattan. Even his similes, which are trustingly poetic, evoke our city life. An elderly patient’s hand is “cool and surprisingly smooth, hardly wrinkled at all, though speckled with brown, like the first drops of rain on dry pavement.” And, as Deborah rushes to make the hospital rounds that constitute her main work, Mr. Rosen reminds us of the humanizing vertigo in skyscrapers: “She often felt like a bright object falling through space alone.”

Deborah’s hospital rounds eventually lead her to Lev, a young man of “muffled uncertainty” whose father, a stroke victim, has attempted to kill himself. Lev asks the attractive rabbi to a Yankees game. Their romance develops into an engagement, and although Lev is the needier half of the couple, Deborah draws on Lev’s more spontaneous, reactive personality as her own faith falters.

As the misfiring son of a recently debilitated father, Lev recalls Chip of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” and the scene in which Lev must change his father’s diaper is especially redolent of “The Corrections.” Mr. Rosen, though, weighs the value of embarrassing his characters just right, and so is able to ask larger questions.

How does faith fare in a great city? For Deborah, religion twigs with mental fitness. It keeps things interesting. “Deborah’s whole life seemed devoted to being alive inside the moment, which is why ritual mattered so much to her.” Lev may not be convinced about God, but the personal initiative of Deborah proves infectious. Asked to perform a funeral in a nail-biting case of mistaken identity, Lev feels “a rising sense of authority, an unexpected feeling of power.” His brushes with faith, in millennial New York, make for an original bildungsroman.

Mr. Rosen made a promising debut seven years ago with “Eve’s Apple.” “Joy Comes in the Morning” fulfills that promise and fills the reader with happiness at the most unexpected moments. Mr. Rosen leads the reader through his characters’ emotions with old-fashioned assurance, and his dual mastery of sincere religiosity and searing embarrassment promises an explosive future for the family romance.

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There is something funny about men with big ideas, and Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey of “The Kinsey Report” is certainly no exception. T.C. Boyle’s novel about Kinsey, “The Inner Circle” (Viking, 418 pages, $25.95), may not be comic, but Mr. Boyle makes much of a man who has the egotistical armature to declare himself a scientist of sex. More pitiful is the disciple, Mr. Boyle’s narrator, John Milk.

Milk comes under the sway of Prok – Kinsey’s nickname – as he graduates from the University of Indiana, where Kinsey works. Milk’s would-be girlfriend and eventual wife, Iris, sees the potential for ridiculousness from the start. “HOW did ever you get that?” she asks when Milk gets a job as a sex researcher.

Mr. Boyle’s plotting is a coup for poetic justice. Red-haired Iris is a masterpiece of adolescent desire – after one summer vacation, Milk recalls how “she seemed smaller, darker, prettier than I’d remembered.” Mr. Boyle casts her as someone having the potential to be quirky without actually being so, someone who might benefit greatly from the coming sexual liberation that Prok was hastening. But her almost biblical mix of naivete and intuition eventually pits her against Prok, and as Milk’s wife she makes his career in sex quite difficult.

Prok is a surrogate father to Milk, but Milk can never measure up. “Prok had indoctrinated me well, and I was getting there, almost over the hump, but I kept slipping back.” In Mr. Boyle’s eyes, which love freakishness, Kinsey was a visionary leader in the vein of Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Like that Victorian, Kinsey arrogated the mental and physical health of a nation, if not to the world, to himself. He spoke of the “human animal” and its need for “outlets.”

Mr. Boyle does not dislike his Kinsey, but the drift of his narrative is clear. When Milk, desperately unhappy that Iris has left him because of Prok’s almost-enforced partner-swapping, pleads that he loves his wife, Prok is swept out of his context. “The word seemed to bounce off him like a pinball hitting a baffle, love, such an unlikely term to incorporate in the scientific lexicon, but give him credit: he bowed to it.”

Mr. Boyle lets us conclude that Kinsey was a scientist more interested in his hypothesis than in his results. Prok eats trail mix for lunch, believes facial hair means you have something to hide, abhors Freud, doesn’t drink, and demands fanatical dedication from his employees: odd traits for a man who insists everybody should act naturally. If Mr. Boyle’s account is realistic, which it seems, we should all be thankful that sex is not the overriding human priority.