Paradoxically, it’s Swift’s decision to frame “Tomorrow” as a monologue centering on a secret — kept both from the reader and from the “you” to whom it’s addressed — that derails this otherwise fine novel. At its core, “Tomorrow” describes one couple’s efforts to find a place for themselves in a world where long-held assumptions about class, gender and propriety are collapsing.  Paula and Mike come from radically different backgrounds. She is the daughter of a thrice-married High Court judge, while he is the love child, conceived during World War II, of a middle-class factory owner. Paula and Mike meet as students at Sussex University, where they almost immediately go to bed together (this is the ’60s, after all) and fall inexorably and permanently in love: “It’s possible,” Paula assures her children, “for the two things to happen at once.” After that, the only stumbling block to their marriage is familial hesitancy, if not hostility: an obstacle they overcome by establishing close relationships with both sets of parents.  From that point on, Paula and Mike’s ascent into bourgeois comfort proceeds unimpeded. Educated as an art historian, she goes to work for a highbrow auction firm, while Mike abandons a career as a scientific researcher to work for a magazine called The Living World, which becomes hugely successful. Along the way, they move from Earl’s Court to Herne Hill to Putney (much of the novel concerns their houses), their love never flagging even as they begin to wonder why Paula can’t seem to get pregnant.  As always, Swift’s prose is elegant and economical, displaying a broad familiarity with a huge range of subjects — from the science of conchology to the geography of coastal Scotland. Appropriately, his storytelling is never less than swift. Nor does he refrain from his signature wordplay with names. “I was hooked,” Paula explains, “or I was the lucky girl who hooked a Hook,” a digression that recalls the undertaker Vic Tucker’s meditation in “Last Orders”: “We’re Tuckers, we fix up dead people. It’s what we do for a living. We tuck ’em up.”  Unfortunately, no quantity of intelligence, empathy or verbal felicity can quite save the novel from its central conceit. In telling her story in a nighttime whisper, Paula reveals facets of herself and her experience the reader might otherwise never glean. Yet by directing her monologue to her children — the narrative’s insistent, sometimes even intrusive “you” — Swift emphasizes the privateness of the story in a way that can leave the reader feeling excluded.  More crucially, the postponement of the crucial revelation irritates even as it compels. Had Swift chosen to come out with it at the beginning, the novel might have been more of a pleasure to read, allowing us to focus on the question of why Paula and Mike made a very particular (and in some ways very dubious) decision. Instead the drum-roll promise, constantly alluded to, of a Big Twist to Come manages to be a distraction even as it keeps us turning the pages. Given this degree of buildup, practically any revelation would come as a disappointment, leaving readers wondering whether it was worth all the fuss — and whether the true object of our frustration should be Paula and Mike or their creator.  There’s one other problem with “Tomorrow.” Where much of “Last Orders” focuses on the characters’ adventures as they make their way to Margate, the present action of “Tomorrow” consists entirely of a woman tossing and turning in bed. By the end of the novel, it’s dawn, and although Paula has shared everything with the reader, she and Mike still haven’t had their talk with the twins. Since that scene never comes, you close this otherwise estimable novel feeling oddly cheated. While anticipating the future, Paula has given us a vivid account of the past. What “Tomorrow” lacks is a today.  255 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.  David Leavitt’s latest novel is “The Indian Clerk.” He is the editor of the literary journal Subtropics.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 726 of the New York edition with the headline: Secrets and Lies. Today's Paper|Subscribe
In Graham Swift’s new novel, a mother stays awake all night, anticipating her children’s reaction to some family news.