NEW YORK — Writer Allegra Goodman is dressed casually in brown corduroys and a beige shirt with lavender flowers. She is also wearing what she laughingly calls her "ruby slippers" — shiny red plastic shoes that suggest "The Wizard of Oz," though they are more loafer than dancing shoes.

"I just like the colors," she says, eying her feet, propped on a coffee table in the Manhattan office of her publisher, Dial Press.

Goodman is playful. She laughs and smiles easily, and is unassuming for someone so accomplished.

At 38, she has published five books — two collections of short stories including the highly regarded "The Family Markowitz," about an endearing three-generational Jewish family, and three novels, including "Kaaterskill Falls," about a mostly Orthodox Jewish summer community in upstate New York. "Kaaterskill Falls" was a 1998 National Book Award finalist.

Her newest novel, "Intuition," about a cancer research laboratory, has won exceptional reviews — "superb," "a stunning achievement" and "richly conceived" in such publications as Entertainment Weekly, The Economist and the Los Angeles Times. Even distinguished Harvard University oncologist and writer Dr. Jerome Groopman weighed in at Slate magazine, saying that "authenticity is the greatest strength of 'Intuition.' "

Goodman's "Intuition" examines the financial pressures to produce meaningful medical research as well as the ethics involved in making the research methods solid. When one of the Cambridge lab researchers comes up with a possible cancer cure, he draws much attention to himself and the lab, including a competitive former lover, the U.S. Congress and People magazine.

Like other fiction by Goodman, "Intuition" also concerns itself with Judaism. Both main characters, a medical oncologist and a research scientist, are Jewish. "The novel is very much about belief, and about faith and about doubt," Goodman says. Not just scientific belief, but also religious belief.

Goodman was drawn to the subject of scientific research because, she says, "I wanted to write about animal research and people who work with animals. I thought it would be a good way to take the reader into the scientific process."

She got help from seven scientists, including a friend who runs a lab and her sister, Dr. Paula Fraenkel, a Boston-based oncologist. They went over Goodman's manuscript to make certain there were no scientific errors.

"My sister is a very literary scientist," Goodman says. "She reads all my work. I take her comments very seriously."

Fraenkel pressed Goodman to focus on having a strong female head research scientist, because most books do not deal with high-level women scientists. "And that influenced me very much in the writing of the book," Goodman says.

Her heroine, Marion Joyce Mendelssohn, has the same middle name as Goodman's mother, Madeline Joyce Goodman, a geneticist, who died of a brain tumor almost 10 years ago, at the age of 51.

"(There's) a little bit of my mother in her," Goodman says of Marion. Her mother also was pragmatic and had an instinct to survive in difficult professional situations, and was funnier — "not shy at all, and a natural leader."

The personalities of Marion and Goodman's other main character, Sandy Glass, are based largely on two people Goodman's mother talked about when Goodman was growing up. One was a statistician — "incredibly gloomy and pessimistic about everything" — and the other, a doctor, "was incredibly optimistic and excited about life and about research. It was night and day with these two. (My mother) was in the middle."

Growing up in Honolulu, where her parents were professors at the University of Hawai'i, was "lovely. Lovely." Goodman says she wore sandals to school, but kept them under her desk during the day. "I have to say, I feel a little sorry for my children that they didn't get to grow up barefoot."

Goodman began writing at an early age. Her father, Lenn Goodman, a professor of religion and philosophy, was corresponding with writer and intellectual Cynthia Ozick and began sending his daughter's poems to Ozick when Allegra was about 7. "She was an extraordinary child," Ozick says, in an interview from her home in New Rochelle, N.Y.

What sets Goodman apart from other Jewish-American writers, Ozick says, is that "Allegra went initially and immediately into not simply Jewish experience and Jewish psychology, but actually into Judaism. And she did it knowledgeably.

"She knows what the Sabbath is. She knows what the holy days are. She knows what observance is. She is completely aware of this and she doesn't make mistakes."

Goodman and her husband, David Karger, and their four children, who range in age from 3 to 13, live in Cambridge, Mass. Karger is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in computer science, and they are members of an Orthodox prayer group; the men and women are seated separately. Her husband wears a yarmulke, or skull cap, even outside the synagogue.

Goodman and Karger met at Harvard. They were taking the same computer class and he broke into her computer. When she tried to type something, her computer would respond with "Why?" "It's sort of the equivalent of somebody putting someone's braids in an inkwell," Goodman says.

Goodman has a doctorate, with a specialty in Shakespeare and 18th-century English literature.

She's too superstitious to say what she's working on now. Karger wants her to do a novel about computer science, though. "He wants me to write a novel of the geek," she laughs.

Will she?

"You never know," she says mysteriously.