BOOKS: Egotists

Gail Godwin likes her people, perhaps a bit too much

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...

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