Egotists

By Paul Gray

Buried within Gail Godwin's ninth novel, The Good Husband (Ballantine; 468 pages; $22.95), is a wry and potentially wicked marital and academic farce. Imagine two imperious egotists -- one, Magda Danvers, a scholar of "visionary" literature, and the other, Hugo Henry, a successful novelist -- cooped up together at a small, liberally endowed college in the Catskills. Give them both passive spouses. Magda has Francis, 12 years her junior, whom she calls "dummy" and other affectionate epithets. Hugo has Alice, who was once his editor and is now nurse to his formidable self-regard. Surely these worms will eventually turn?

One of them at long last does, but comedy has nothing to do with it. Godwin, a best-selling and deservedly admired author, plays her story straight. She not only likes Magda and Hugo, she thinks they are every bit as profound and talented as they do.

This authorial cheerleading causes some problems. Magda's losing battle with ovarian cancer is movingly portrayed, but her charismatic brilliance -- insisted upon by the worshippers who gather at her bedside -- remains elusive. One of her mots, about marriage, is deemed deep enough to serve as an epigraph to the novel: "Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates." Food for thought, perhaps, but only to the very hungry. As for Hugo, he gives lectures, largely left to the imagination, that provoke women and men to hug him afterward. And a rather vapid remark he makes comparing a mother and a wife arouses "uproarious laughter."

Maybe you had to be there. But that is what good fiction is supposed to do: convince readers that they are there. For all of Godwin's generosity and narrative skill, The Good Husband is not a very good novel.