Fantasy Life

By Paul Gray

DYING YOUNG

by Marti Leimbach

Doubleday; 278 pages; $17.95

Victor Geddes, 33, suffers from leukemia. Abandoning his chemotherapy, he places an ad in the Boston Globe for a companion and caretaker; Hilary Atkinson, 27, applies for the job. Soon these two fall in love and move to the anonymity of a rented room on the Massachusetts coast. There, as winter sets in, they meet Gordon, 30, who becomes Victor's friend and, on the sly, Hilary's lover. The situation is messy, but at least members of the menage can foresee one outcome for certain: Victor will die soon.

This premise promises a grim and lugubrious read. So publishing eyebrows shot up last summer when this novel, Marti Leimbach's first, pulled in some $500,000 in advances, including a movie deal with 20th Century Fox. These are uncommon bucks for a beginning writer. What gives?

As Dying Young makes its way into bookstores, all that money begins to look like a canny investment. There has always been a healthy market for doomed romance. Furthermore, this novel plays upon a current preoccupation -- explicitly stated in its title -- without raising the troubling specter of AIDS. Finally, Leimbach, 26, proves herself to be both a deft writer and a shrewd judge of just how much sentimentality her traffic will bear.

The author's smartest move is letting Hilary tell the tale. This young woman seems peculiarly passive and affectless, not the sort to dwell on or even recognize pathos or tragedy. All perceptions -- grocery displays, radio chatter, the sight of Victor vomiting in a bathroom -- pass through her consciousness with equal weightlessness. Hilary constantly learns things that anyone her age should probably already know. She removes some pictures from the room she and Victor have rented: "When I took them from the wall I noticed that the spaces the frames had occupied were a darker shade than the rest of the wall." When she feels the need to conduct a reality check, Hilary looks in the mirror: "I have clear skin and nice, square shoulders. My hair shines like it did when I was seven and I have a smart-looking face."

She also has the chance to live out a fantasy: two men devoted to her, one of them virile and the other literally dying in her arms. Whether Leimbach intends Hilary to be as dim-witted as she seems is immaterial. The trick finally works. Near the end, something dawns on Hilary that is not a truism. As Victor's imminent death begins to seem real to her, she realizes that he "has made it seem that the future of a relationship is not as important as I once imagined." It would be nice to hear Victor on whether dying is a price he willingly pays to teach Hilary about life. But she has the last and only words.