Susanna Daniel is prepared. Stiltsville is a first novel, and she knows what usually happens with first novels.

"Oprah won’t call, the reviews will be mixed, sales will be disappointing," she says. "There’s a sense of the calm before the calm. I’m going to do a little tour of the local bookstores, take a picture, and nobody else will think it’s anything but an ordinary Tuesday."

Behind this depressive façade lies a quietly remarkable novel. Stiltsville the place is a bizarre accumulation of houses on stilts in Biscayne Bay that was severely thinned out by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Stiltsville is down to seven houses now, none of them occupied, and is owned by the National Park Service, at least until the next hurricane takes out the remaining houses.

Stiltsville the novel is about a marriage, a good marriage, which is to say one with difficulties but one where the underlying devotion of the two people is never in question. In its resolute refusal to sensationalize or introduce melodrama into a novel that is about the profundity of the domestic, it’s reminiscent of Marilynn Robinson’s Home, a comparison Daniel finds unsettling. "Robinson doesn’t just write quiet books," she says, "she writes stealth books."

The most exotic thing about the novel is the setting. Daniel grew up in Coral Gables, where her father is a divorce lawyer. The family had a house in Stiltsville, which she always thought would be a great place to set a novel.

"One or two Stiltsville families would share a house with a few other families, because it was a lot to keep up with only one family. We had it one week a month. It was like a timeshare."

Daniels’ house was destroyed by Andrew. "Afterward, we rode out there in boats. My father got emotional. I have a picture of my brother sitting on top of one of the pilings that remained – PVC pipe with cement poured into them."

The book took 10 years to write, a fact which Daniel seems to find slightly embarrassing. "My focus shifted, and unless I have a tremendous amount of focus on the writing, it doesn’t happen. My mom was dying, and then she died, and it was difficult to think, much less write. I couldn’t do it. It was a failure of will."

She attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and, while a lot of writers have mixed feelings about MFA programs, you won’t hear about them from Daniel.

"For me, to say ‘Don’t go to an MFA program’ is like saying ‘Don’t travel for a year in Europe.’ It’s a lifestyle choice. I was in New York, and had just been offered a managing editor position at my job, the Princeton Review. I was doing well, I had an apartment I liked and a boyfriend I liked. And I had a life that was going well, and I had to decide if I was going to take the first step to be a writer.

"I had to change my lifestyle, and the MFA was a great way to do it. They offered me money to write in a community of writers. And I learned a lot. But I don’t think it’s for everybody. Some people already have writing lives, but I didn’t."

At its core, Stiltsville is a portrait of the 30-year marriage of Dennis and Frances DuVal. Daniel wrote most of it before she was married, so it’s not drawn from her own experiences. "My parents’ marriage was complicated in ways that Frances’ wasn’t. But Frances is my mother in a lot of ways; I wrote Frances to honor my mother. I wanted to write a book about a marriage that’s basically successful but not completely successful, which is probably unrealistic.

"There were times in writing it when I thought, ‘I need to make something happen.’ But I always ended up taking it out, because that’s not the book I wanted to write. I’m fascinated by marriage. Fascinated. Pretty much all I want to write about is marriage; I’m not even as interested in parenthood as I am in marriage. (Daniel’s child is 22 months old.)

"Marriage is this quietly dramatic thing that happens all around us, and we have no idea what’s going on. You enter into it with as much information as you can, but it’s basically an act of faith. Every marriage reinvents the wheel, and every marriage is entirely different."

Daniel lives in Madison, Wis., and expects to be there for a long time to come, even though it hasn’t been an easy adjustment. "I feel like an alien in the Midwest. I feel like I’m kind of zany and difficult to understand from the Midwestern point of view. I say ‘I’m from Miami,’ and people say, ‘I’ve never met anyone from Miami.’

"I’ve always thought that Miami is the most beautiful city in the country, but nobody has ever agreed with me. I just miss the beauty."