"The Newlyweds," a Novel by Nell Freudenberger "The Newlyweds," Nell Freudenberger's affecting if sometimes ungainly new novel, starts off as a sort of high-concept Hollywood movie, mashing up the familiar fish-out-of-water story line with a girl-torn-between-two-boys plot. What all feels a bit like a paint-by-numbers exercise, however, gradually opens out into a genuinely moving story about a woman trying to negotiate two cultures, balancing her parents" expectations with her own aspirations, her ambition and cynical practicality with deeper, more romantic yearnings. The premise is this: Amina, a determined young Bangladeshi, meets an older American man named George on an online dating site; they e-mail for 11 months before meeting, and she eventually moves to America and marries him. It is more like the arranged marriage of Amina's grandparents than like her parents" love match. Not all that surprisingly, there is little chemistry between the newlyweds, and during a trip home Amina realizes that she still loves Nasir, a family friend and her teenage crush. At the same time her new suburban life in Rochester represents the American dream she and her parents have spent years fantasizing about, and she wages a fierce campaign to bring her mother and father to the States. The novel grew out of a story called "An Arranged Marriage," which appeared in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" fiction issue in 2010 and was originally inspired, Ms. Freudenberger said in a New Yorker interview, by a young woman she met on an airplane who had just come to the United States from Bangladesh to marry an American man she'd met on the Internet. In the acknowledgements to this novel, Ms. Freudenberger thanks Farah Deeba Munni for sharing her story (and making introductions to her family in Dhaka and Haibatpur and her husband in the States) and for "giving me the freedom to make something entirely different" from it. Ms. Freudenberger dealt with similar cross-cultural themes - Americans abroad, or foreigners visiting the United States - in her debut collection of stories, "Lucky Girls," and her first novel, "The Dissident." Here, she avoids sentimentalizing her characters, but she also initially fails to give us much insight into their inner lives. As a result they emerge in the first part of the novel as brittle stick figures who are more annoying than compelling. Amina comes across as a calculating fortune seeker, willing to marry a man with whom she enjoys no emotional or sexual connection simply to get to the United States, while George comes across as a fussbudget loser, whose chief appeal rests in his ability to help a poor foreigner get a green card, and eventually, an American passport. Amina finds sex with George unpleasant or tolerable at best. She often thinks that he doesn't know who she is, and she comes to believe that much of his past will always remain a mystery. For that matter, both Amina and George turn out to be keeping major secrets from each other - secrets about earlier romantic attachments that they have not completely put behind them. Although Ms. Freudenberger's account lacks the precision and emotional detail that, say, Jhumpa Lahiri has brought to her descriptions of Bengali immigrants adapting to life in the American suburbs, she works hard to chronicle with sympathy and humor Amina's efforts to master the new protocols of daily life in Rochester. Amina learns to shovel snow, passes her driver's test, gets a job at Starbucks, studies for her citizenship exam. She talks to her mother nearly every day and thinks about trying to put off having a baby until her mother arrives to help her. She also thinks about making plans for a proper Muslim wedding - which she's promised her parents she would have, in addition to the civil ceremony - but keeps putting it off. She has a hard time understanding the American concept of sarcasm, of meaning the opposite of what the words suggest. Where "The Newlyweds" comes alive is in the second half, when Amina returns to Bangladesh to try to obtain American visas for her increasingly unstable mother and her hapless father, who has had one business disaster after another. Writing about a foreign country seems to kick Ms. Freudenberger's gift for observation into high gear, and she does a visceral job of conjuring the place where Amina grew up: the countryside "so green that you almost expected to look up and see a green sun in the sky; the city streets, hazardous with mobs and rickshaws and pools of black sewage. Here there are roaches in the hospital corridors and the danger of violent assaults in which acid is thrown at an enemy. But here there is also a dense network of extended family, family friends and neighbors, a support system in the face of the swirling whirlpools of fortune. More important, Ms. Freudenberger captures in these later pages Amina's confusion, her sense of being caught between two cultures, of having become someone who is regarded as an outsider in both her new adopted country and the country she still thinks of as home. In America she is seen as uptight and overly worried about propriety and appearances; in Bangladesh she is seen as the headstrong one "who'd done everything her own way." She is nostalgic for her girlhood but suffocated by her gossipy, competitive and overprotective relatives; flooded with fond memories of her youth, but also newly aware - as a now cosseted American - of the inconveniences, dangers and frustrations of life in Bangladesh. A cousin congratulates Amina on escaping the provinciality and poverty there and achieving "the dream life in America," and yet when Amina sees her teenage crush, Nasir, she feels all the ardor and intensity that is lacking in her marriage to George and wonders what sort of life she and Nasir might have had together - might still have, if he reciprocates her feelings. The Amina-Nasir relationship and Amina's relationship with her aging parents are the nucleus of this novel and reveal the contradictions deep within Amina's own heart. Unlike her synthetic partnership with George, these are real, complex, deeply felt connections that have both endured and changed over time, and in depicting them Ms. Freudenberger demonstrates her assurance as a novelist and her knowledge of the complicated arithmetic of familial love and the mathematics of romantic passion.