From Library Journal
Two oddly mismatched married couples are the focus of Godwin's (Father Melancholy's Daughter, LJ 2/1/91) powerful new novel. Magda Danvers, once a brilliant literary theorist, now a dying professor at a small private college, is married to "good husband" and former seminarian Francis Lake. "Frannie" devotedly attends to his beloved, impatient older wife while she is dying. Watching this with wonder is Alice, young wife of famous novelist Hugo, who is also teaching at the college. After a botched home birth, Alice and Hugo's baby has died, and their grief has sent the marriage into a frosty decline. Godwin's intensely drawn characters are vividly portrayed during the most intimate times of love, marriage, and death. The result is a winner.--Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
At the center of Godwin's complex novel of loss and mortality is the flamboyant, penetrating Magda Danvers. She was featured in Time 25 years ago as "the Dark Lady of Visions" when she published her doctoral research on visionary poets and prophets before she had defended it. Now 58 years old, a star professor at a college in upstate New York, Magda is taking her own "final examination" under the tutelage of ovarian cancer. At her side is her thoughtful but unreflective husband, Francis Lake, who left the seminary at age 21 to dedicate himself for nearly a quarter-century to Magda rather than to the Lord. As Magda's condition worsens, another grieving couple is drawn into her orbit: fiftyish southern novelist Hugo Henry, the college's writer-in-residence, and his second wife, Alice, formerly his editor, who have just lost their only child in a tragic home birth. Alice in particular has suffered far too many losses in her 34 years, yet she finds refuge in the Danvers-Lake household. Remarkably, Godwin's story is laced with humor, thanks to Magda's enduring wit and the idiocies of a number of her academic colleagues. A Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection, this subtle, moving meditation on the nature of intimacy and influence, and the differences between good matches and good mates, will have wide appeal. Mary Carroll


From Kirkus Reviews
A dying academic, an oblivious house husband, a self-centered Southern writer, and a grieving ex-editor suffer much angst in Godwin's (Father Melancholy's Daughter, 1991, etc.) latest domestic drama--a meditation on marriage in which the prose is always supple but also more than a little dull. Haughty 58-year-old Magda Danvers, an English professor who's still resting on the laurels of the one book she published decades earlier, is holding court from her deathbed, and a gaggle of academics--suck-ups, gossips, parodies all--pay their respects. Magda calls her ovarian cancer her ``Gargoyle'' and the last months of her life her ``Final Examination.'' As she decays, she is waited upon by her husband, Francis Lake, who is 12 years her junior and gave up the priesthood for her. For 25 years Magda has earned the money while unambitious, nonintrospective Francis has kept house and contented himself with basking in her limelight. Alice Henry, whose baby has just choked on his umbilical cord, finds a peculiar solace in Magda's sickroom. Passive-aggressive Alice can't stomach her novelist husband, Hugo, who's 16 years her senior, and wonders if perhaps she married him because she was in love with his writing--after all, she was his editor. As she becomes closer to Magda and Francis and ponders their unlikely union, she falls in love with Francis, who seems totally unaware of her intentions. Hugo, meanwhile, baffled by Alice's hatred, is fighting off writers' block and learns, to his dismay, that his son from a previous marriage is gay. As each undergoes a self-reckoning, Hugo compares the stages of writing a novel with the stages of a marriage, and Magda, referring to a poem by Donne, welcomes death as her ``good husband.'' Godwin is more enamored, and convinced, of Magda's and Hugo's brilliance than her readers will be. Polished, often incisive, but pompous and obvious as well; with none of the bracing acuity of Sue Miller's For Love, which also put relations between the sexes under a microscope. Particularly disappointing for a novelist of Godwin's stature. (First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club featured selections; $75,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

The author of A Mother and Two Daughters creates a superbly drawn portrait of two marriages and four unforgettable characters in the throes of life and death. Magda Danvers is the magnificent central character who, from her death bed, tranforms and influences all those around her--until her incandescent last days, when the secret of Magda's "good marriage" is revealed for the first and last time.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mates are not always matches, and matches are not always mates," pronounces Magda Danvers, the magnificent central figure in Gail Godwin's wise and affecting new novel. With The Good Husband, one of America's most gifted novelists creates a portrait of two marriages and four unforgettable characters that travels beyond the usual questions of love and domestic comfort to explore the most profound consequences of intimate relationships. It is also, in its deepest sense, a novel about how we influence and transform - and sometimes complete - one another. As a young woman, brilliant, charismatic, and eternally curious, Marsha Danziger transformed herself into Magda Danvers, taking the academic world by storm with her controversial treatise on visionaries, The Book of Hell. She was already a star when she came upon Francis Lake in a midwestern seminary and married him, to everyone's surprise, including their own. It was a mating that seemed perfect: Magda pursued her career, and attentive, caring Francis devoted himself to Magda. Now, Magda's grave illness puts their marriage to its ultimate test. Even as she faces her "Final Examination," Magda's genius does not desert her. From her bed she continues to arouse her visitors with compelling thoughts and questions, which will change the lives of some of them. Into the heady atmosphere of Magda's provocative repartee comes Alice Henry, fresh from her own family tragedy. Magda's room soon becomes a refuge for Alice from her crumbling marriage to brooding Southern novelist Hugo Henry. But is it the incandescence of Magda's ideas that draws Alice, or the secret of "the good marriage" that she is desperate to discover? For Alice, Hugo, Francis, and Magda will learn that the most ideal relationship - even a perfect marriage - doesn't come without a price. Gracefully written, keenly insightful, intimate in its revelations, The Good Husband reverberates with the lives of its characters, their histories, and the most urgent l

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal