The novel Immortality is occupied with the fates of two sets of lovers: Agnes (the central character, as most surely evoking the sympathy of the author and therefore his reader), her well-meaning but inept husband Paul, her sister Laura, and Laura's lover Bernard. While Laura is demonstrative, erotic, at home in her own body, aggressive and destructive, Agnes is the opposite: highly sensitive, desirous of solitude, even a bit weary of the contests of love and life. As Laura's histrionics of despair threaten the rare peace to be found, Agnes is killed, quite without reason, in an auto mishap. This leaves Laura, who has already driven away Bernard, free to marry Paul and thus assert the immortality of her love. Such is the plot of Immortality.

Yet to describe the plot and its characters in this way is to miss the essence of the novel. Here...