The best major American novel of the year so far, Allegra Goodman’s “Intuition” (Dial Press, 344 pages, $25), undertakes a worldliness not often seen in any medium. Ms. Goodman possesses the umbrella wisdom dreamed of by any frustrated newspaper reader who despairs of finding a politician who appreciates an intellectual, or an intellectual who appreciates a politician.

Set in Cambridge, Mass., n 1985, “Intuition” imagines an oncology lab led by two distinct personalities: Sandy Glass, a part-time clinician whose promotional savvy leaves his partner, Marion Mendelssohn, a dedicated scientist who has “grown thin and patient, critical of herself and others,” time to work. Marion’s patience sets the novel’s conflict in motion; it is pit against the dogged “intuition” of her star post-doc, Cliff, who believes he has found a cure for cancer.

At the congressional hearing that later investigates Cliff’s tenuous claims, one of the lab’s lawyers debates a Rep. Redfield’s “extraordinary line of questioning, which does not focus on experiments or data, but on the culture of the laboratory.” Yet it is precisely the culture of the lab – and the deeper question of a scientist’s fundamental mind-set – that animates Ms. Goodman’s novel. Marion, for example, sees her inborn doubt as a kind of intelligence, and later decides that it is an unwanted emotion, like self-pity. Her patience, too, changes course; in the novel’s final act, she turns on her colleagues, taking the reins from Sandy, her longtime partner.

A drama of this complexity will, in the best hands, move like clockwork, and “Intuition” does. Ms. Goodman uses every part of the buffalo: A diary entry that looked like ambient characterization comes up again, subpoenaed in court. In her meticulousness, Ms. Goodman can overdo a point, but her pedantic thrusts come to seem a part of her characters’ interior sinks:

‘He’s talented,’ she said.

‘So what?’

They both knew that in the end, talent hardly mattered if you couldn’t get results. Lots of people were talented. Talent and intelligence, not to mention tireless hard work, got lab scientists through the door, but – this was the dirty secret – you needed luck. You might be prepared and bright and diligent, and fail and fail and fail.

Ms. Goodman paints Cambridge, where she lives, as a place of non-Faustian ambition, where an intellect’s aspirations seem either wellmeant or simply mistaken, but never devilish. Some of this vanilla excellence comes through in Ms. Goodman’s own style, which often sounds more selected than spoken: “Although Jacob no longer practiced seriously, he was a wily competitor.” On the same page: “The difference was, Marion’s pessimism had been earned, while Feng was a natural.” These distinctions make sense, however, and they fit the Cantabridgian scene.

Ms. Goodman writes from the viewpoint of four major characters and more minor ones, and she is always on, swooshing in to introduce a character at any instance. Characterization and events are totally fused; here again her style can seem pedantic. Marion, the rigorist, “loved to taste the bitter in food as much as other people loved the sweet.” Sometimes, for minor characters, she borrows, a little too briskly, from satirized campus stereotypes like the absentminded professor or the eccentric: Larry, a programmer at MIT, “had a pronounced New York accent, and wore a white cowboy hat and bolo tie, as if to show he came from a part of Brooklyn in the Southwest. He built harpsichords from kits in his spare time, although he played them badly.”

These weak spots appear in the middle of the novel, where Ms. Goodman must establish the ambiguity on which “Intuition” rests. Cliff’s ex, Robin, grows suspicious of Cliff’s amazing results and reports her misgivings, with some evidence, to the National Institutes of Health. Ms. Goodman’s own narratorial intervention would do the trick, but she keeps in character, alternately jealous Robin or careless Cliff, unloosing her own authorial omniscience only once, when at the end she must finally comment on the extent to which Cliff fools himself – an analysis even Cliff himself could not undertake.

Meanwhile, Ms. Goodman will not let you root for anyone for very long. Each character’s voice is so convincing that he or she will change your mind about another character whom you have known intimately in a previous chapter. Marion and Sandy bond and battle, then Robin and Cliff dominate the tale, chasing a floating criterion of justice. Even the denouement seems to bite its own tail, drawing fresh blood. Robin reflects: “How strange the way success and failure contain each other.” Hearing follows hearing, and even in the last paragraph Marion is still learning, advancing the plot.

A book with no simple grain, “Intuition” outdoes the reader; it proves the robustness of Cantabridgian diligence, plotted to encompass both sides of the mind with calm workmanship. In the lab, hairless mice and their tumors open pinpricks of horror in the toylike gloss of Harvard Square, as Ms. Goodman’s bottomless themes waft up from her studious prose.

blytal@nysun.com