As The Good Husband opens, Magda Danvers has just learned that her ovarian cancer is incurable. Magda, a brilliant scholar who has never lived up to her early promise, resolves to discover the meaning of her own death.

The novel follows her last months in considerable detail as she struggles to pass this "Final Examination" well, and on her own terms.

Of course death is a perennial concern of humankind. The nineteenthcentury novel tended to sentimentalize and domesticate death. Twentieth-century fiction, in large part, has shared our culture's refusal to give it sustained attention. Death certainly occurs in modern novels, but most often as the starting point, the resolution, or the by-product of other plot developments.

Recently some novels have again used death as a central subject. The AIDS epidemic and the spread of non-Western or New Age philosophies are social trends that may have contributed...