[In the following review, Karbo finds in Worst Fears an unexpected compassion, which, she writes, "makes it one of her best novels yet."]

If you want the truth about the man-woman thing, forget all those cloying self-help books and read Fay Weldon. Her 20 novels,—Worst Fears is her 21st—are the literary equivalent of a stiff drink, a dip in the Atlantic in January, a pep talk by a mildly sadistic coach.

Ms. Weldon's work will never inspire a compact disk of love songs or a cookbook filled with goopy treats. The author of the diabolical best seller The Life and Loves of a She-Devil calls it as she sees it—not a popular approach when dealing with our most cherished state of self-delusion, romantic love.

Alexandra Ludd is a minor actress who lives happily in the West Country of England in a historic hovel called the Cottage, along with her husband. Ned, an Ibsen scholar, their 4 year-old son, Sascha; and Diamond, an ill-tempered Labrador retriever. Worst Fears opens with the untimely death of Ned, at 49, of an apparent heart attack, suffered while Alexandra was up in London starring as Nora in A Doll's House and Ned was home alone watching a tape of Casablanca. Also apparently.

What follows is a snappy whodunit of the heart. The plot unfurls to reveal that Ned was not, in fact, alone when he died, and, on the heels of this, the more complicated and profound revelations that the marriage of Ned and Alexandra was something of a sham, Ned was a cad, Alexandra was a dunce and the women who called themselves Alexandra's friends were duplicitous in just about every way imaginable. In short, Alexandra's worst fears turn out to be true.

One of the pleasures of Ms. Weldon's novel lies in the way the tables are turned on Alexandra. Midway through Worst Fears, all the sympathy she would naturally receive as the grieving widow are accorded instead to Ned's mistress. "It's hard for women when their married lovers die," says her brother-in-law, Hamish, piously. "Rightly or wrongly, the widow has the sympathy of the world: surely you could afford to spare a little for her?"

Alexandra is abandoned by her friends, browbeaten by her own mother, sold out by the producer of her play. Even the dog snubs her.

Ned's mistress is Jenny Linden, a gnomish set designer and every contemporary woman's worst fear. She has a puckered face; short, dirty hair; double chins and, the ultimate horror, flab. But, during the course of the novel, Alexandra realizes that Jenny possesses a "stubborn, sexy helplessness in the face of her own passions, which men found so attractive." That Jenny—initially absurd to the point of caricature—grows into a convincing and even touching love object is a testimony to Ms. Weldon's knack for writing about desire and the unexpected power of the weak.

Ms. Weldon's earlier books are hysterical, fierce and gleefully mean in a way that only British novelists seem to be able to get away with. Yet Worst Fears also possesses a few uncharacteristically quiet moments, the sort that betray an unvarnished kindness that's part of genuine understanding.

In the belief that a woman had to be beautiful, and sensuous, and witty, and wonderful, in order to trigger real love, erotic love, the kind of emotional drama that ran through to the heart of the universe, the hot line to the source of life itself, the in-love kind, Alexandra had been wrong. More, she had shown herself to be vain, and foolish, and shallow, and Ned had noticed. Not that his noticing had anything to do with it. You did not love necessarily where you were admired or cease to love when admiration failed. Love came and went; it was there or it wasn't. The blessing of the gods, and their curse.

I can't imagine that Fay Weldon has suddenly gone kinder and gentler on us; she's the quintessential anti-romance novelist and always will be. But she's filed down a few sharp edges in Worst Fears, and that makes it one of her best novels yet.