The complicated past of two lovers comes to a head on a Friday afternoon in “Rapture,” a novella by Susan Minot.

Benjamin Young is a 30-something filmmaker in a constant state of despair and confusion, who for the past eight years has been trying to make an independent film.

During the course of the project, he meets Kay Bailey, with whom he instantly falls in love, despite the fact that he has a fianc‚e.

Kay doesn’t share the same sentiment at first, but eventually requites Benjamin’s feelings, and for three years the two have random sexual encounters. Benjamin, however, doesn’t want to leave his fianc‚e because of the support she gave him throughout the making of the film, and this is a fact Kay can’t reconcile.

These and more complicated elements of their relationship are revealed as the two are having sex during their Friday lunch break. The novella consists of a volley between the thoughts of the two as they both consider the way they feel about themselves individually and as a possible “couple.”

Benjamin recounts the many lies he has told to both Kay and his fianc‚e, Vanessa, and reflects on how he feels about himself as a person who is both dishonest and emotionally unstable, falling in and out of love almost weekly with the two women.

Kay is relatively stable and strong in comparison, wondering what a long-term relationship with Benjamin would be like, as she distrusts his intentions and his declarations of love.

“Rapture” is mostly a psychological portrait of two realistic characters, but Minot also devoted a great deal of content to delving into what sex is and how it plays different roles in the lives of different people.

Minot establishes well the conflicted and complex feelings Kay and Benjamin have for each other, and their separate narratives are convincing. The thoughts they are having seem realistic: Minot captures Benjamin’s confused mentality as well as Kay’s, which is grounded and distrustful.

The form of the novella is innovative, but by the end I had gotten a little tired of only having the perspective of two characters.

Minot describes quite a few sexual scenes, but all are written tastefully, and they aren’t gratuitous in the sense that they are meant to reveal character rather than merely provide a dicey thrill for the reader.

The take each character has on sex also reveals a lot about their nature and also raises the continual question posed through the novel of whether or not males and females differ in both thought structure and sexual conceptualization.

A short read at only 116 pages, I was surprised at how much of a story Minot conveyed through the novella, and felt at the end like I’d read a quite larger novel.