Author Stephen McCauley's career is deceptive. A writer who burst onto the scene with his acclaimed debut The Object Of My Affection, McCauley could be painted as a retiring author with a gently barbed take on modern society à la Barbara Pym, as a teacher at Brandeis who turns out inspired spins on gays and society at large with disarming regularity.

On the other hand, as he told Queersighted in an exclusive interview, McCauley wrote the final draft of his latest book, Insignificant Others ($25; Simon & Schuster) in a monastery, proselytizes the ukulele among his friends ("I do an awesome 90-second rendition of 'Windmills of My Mind'"), and has suddenly realized that when he's writing under a pen name, McCauley can dash off a novel in about four weeks rather than four years.

Wonderfully named, Insignificant Others is about Richard, a gay man working in a human resources department who is astonished to realize his lover may be seeing someone on the side, even though Richard himself is seeing someone on the side (a married man with a wife and two children), and an open relationship is what he wants. He thinks.

Just who exactly is the insignificant other, wonders Richard in what Publishers Weekly calls an "adroit...accomplished comedy" and about which Booklist says, "as amusing as the story is, readers will truly care about Richard's fate." Kirkus Reviews adds to the praise by saying it has "pithy observations, lightness of touch and generosity of spirit." All worth placing alongside earlier praise for McCauley, like the one that dubbed him "the love child of Woody Allen and Edith Wharton."

The Woody Allen comparison is apt since it's tempting to cherry pick his novels -- which include Alternatives to Sex and True Enough, among others -- for the funniest, most acute observations like, "From what I can tell, the chief distinguishing factor between children and adults is that children hear everything while appearing not to, and adults hear nothing while pretending to listen," and the argument that reality TV competitions have made cut-throat behavior at work "much more common and sophisticated."

"Do you think it's true?" he asks, laughing. "We assume it's all entertainment. But it's so pervasive in the culture it has to have some impact on collegial relationships and ways to get ahead. I've been on the fringes of academia and that's somewhat cutthroat, which surprised me. The lower the stakes the more cutthroat it becomes."

The stakes have always seemed modest in his disarmingly engaging novels with their witty, painfully self-aware protagonists and open-ended narratives. (That ambiguity serves him well: McCauley is big in France. Seriously, they love him.)

But two decades into his career, McCauley and his partner Sebastian Stuart are both poised for broader success.

Stuart -- the author of acclaimed novels The Hour Between and The Mentor -- is set to launch in October the first in what's hoped to be a successful mystery series built around NYC psychotherapist-turned–antiques dealer Janet Petrocelli. (To the Manor Dead comes out in October.)

Meanwhile, McCauley was approached about writing a series of novels in the women's fiction genre under a pen name. Keep in mind, self-confidence is not his forte.

"I've built as part of the personality of all my books these narrators who are self-doubting and self-deprecating and self-effacing and all of that stuff, all of which has its source in me," says McCauley. "I just doubt every sentence that I write. It doesn't make for an easy or pleasant writing experience."

So the results of writing under an assumed name surprised this writer who generally takes four years between novels. He was overwhelmed with finishing Insignificant Others (at an Episcopalian monastery, no less -- anything to get away from the internet), not to mention his teaching duties, admitting that this other project was pushed aside repeatedly.

"It was late January, and I went to the editor and said, 'Really, when is this stuff due?' She said, 'I really have to have a first draft completed by March 1.'

"At that stage I had 28 pages," admits McCauley. "But I sat down and I just wrote it in six weeks. I had a huge amount of fun writing it. And I really think it's because I was writing in the guise of this other person. It was very liberating. It was a great experience. That experience has made me hopeful that I can actually bring a little of that to my own quote-unquote work."

Though his books are often labeled as comic novels (with the "merely" implied, but unspoken), McCauley's tales are layered with pain and poignancy and frankly, he usually runs in the opposite direction whenever a happy ending seems possible. The most he offers his characters is the possibility for some happiness down the road. Jane Austen, he's not.

"I just want to give the characters enough insight into themselves by the end of the book and enough of a slight change that now it's in their powers to make their life better," says McCauley. "Whether they do or not is up to them. To me that's more truthful than a real happy ending. Not that I don't like happy endings in books."

In fact, his latest is the exception that proves the rule.

"Someone wrote me an email and said, 'Oh, that's like the happiest ending you've written,' which kind of shocked me because I didn't think of it as that happy an ending," says McCauley.

Writing can do that: reveal something of yourself you didn't realize or intend. And so can interviews. When McCauley turns to movies, he starts to discuss the films of Mike Leigh and unintentionally delivers a perfect description of his own work.

"The first film of his I saw was Life Is Sweet," says McCauley. "It was so touching and so sad and so funny. No big resolutions -- just a little step in the right direction."

Postscript: Here's a blast from the past: the trailer for the movie version of The Object of My Affection, which McCauley has come to appreciate on its own terms, though it ditched much of his dialogue. On the other hand, it did give Paul Rudd an early break while also giving him the opportunity to play gay disarmingly well. The most striking thing about the trailer is how the mere fact of Rudd's gayness is considered so provocative. It's easy to forget how quickly times have changed.