The Country is a novel about an unfashionable subject: growing very old and dying of natural cause. Of course there is more to it than that, David Plante being a writer of quite considerable range. But the central concern of the novel is the simple, mundane act of dying, and the effect it has upon those members of a family who must witness it.

The novel, like its subject, is neither glamorous nor sexy. Plante's prose is spare, measured, quietly insistent; though the novel is brief, it conveys the labored pace of a long dying. It also conveys both the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of dying, its universality and its uniqueness.

The man who dies is Jim Francoeur…. He is the patriarch of a family in Providence, Rhode Island, that also includes his wife and their seven sons. As was The Family, The Country is narrated by the...