A character in Bonnie Burnard’s Suddenly smacks her husband, not entirely playfully, with a copy of Lives of Girls and Women. The allusion is appropriate, though Suddenly is not so much an homage to Alice Munro’s classic novel as to its title. Burnard’s book is unabashedly a story about ordinary women’s lives, and it delivers a metaphoric smack to anyone who would find fault with that.

There is a sense in the novel that the lives of ordinary women are frequently neglected in our culture at large. One of Burnard’s many references to visual art notes that in the world’s great galleries “there were never any portraits of exhausted, faithful friends.” Here we find such a portrait.

Sandra, Colleen, and Jude have spent decades together raising their children, working at marriages, vacationing, surviving health scares, having their hair cut at the same salon, and always managing to find something to talk about. Formerly brides, then housewives and mothers, they’d all remained metaphoric girls for most of their lives. As Burnard asserts, “Women got to be called women only when they hit menopause, after the cycle, the buildup and loss, had stopped.”

The novel begins with Sandra’s breast cancer diagnosis. Fast-forward four years to the end of her struggle; Jude and Colleen are as close to her as ever, supporting her husband Jack and providing Sandra with home care. Sandra’s death is now inevitable; Burnard’s novel is an examination of life in the face of such grim acceptance, of how the process of dying changes a person, and those around her. Sandra is surprised to discover exactly what it is she wants: not to go through the experience alone. She is also surprised to find that it’s not dying she dreads, but rather leaving: “Not your poor sore body but all your known life, gone, stopped. Taken. As if you haven’t loved it or earned it.”

Unconcerned with the afterlife, Sandra has instead made her death a kind of project for the time she has left. The considerations around the minutiae of her life’s end are the novel’s most striking features – the pressure of coming up with last words when she begins slipping into delirium, what to do with a lifetime’s worth of journals or with the expensive soaps and bath oils she keeps receiving as gifts. And how is she to help her husband navigate the rest of his life without her?

Suddenly provides an effective portrait of the modern experience of death and dying. Sandra’s point of view fades from the novel’s forefront as her mind begins to shut down, and the narrative is taken up by her friends. Sandra maintains her role as the prime mover in the book, however, by way of the personal journals she leaves behind. Colleen and Jude leaf through the journals at Sandra’s bedside, and the words of the dying woman evoke their shared history.

Comparisons to Burnard’s Giller Prize-winning debut novel, A Good House, are inevitable. Ghosts of the previous novel haunt Suddenly in a curious way, including characters with the same names, a dog named Sailor, a hand missing fingers, and a kind of icing called sea foam. Both novels deal in quotidian details – the things people eat and wear and say – and assume that ordinary lives contain stories worth telling.

The strength of A Good House was its wide scope, which allowed readers to be party to ordinary lives unfolding over time. Chronology itself was the propulsive force in the novel, whereas Suddenly – fixed as it is in the present day – lacks the same momentum. The narrative is structured around Sandra’s decline, but there is an inevitability to this story arc, and a third of the novel remains once she is dead and gone.

This narrative structure fails to illuminate the novel’s heart: the history of the women’s friendship and the story of their lives together. This history is alluded to in Sandra’s journals, but the journals themselves are a facile plot device, awkwardly integrated into the central narrative. However effective Burnard’s portrayal of Sandra’s death is, we’re left without a real understanding of what Colleen and Jude lose when it happens, or indeed of who these women truly are.

Burnard has attempted to draw that rarely seen portrait of “exhausted, faithful friends,” but unfortunately the portrait lacks a vital dimension. For friends who talk so much, the novel contains little dialogue, instead consisting mainly of extended paragraphs of introspective musings in a distancing third-person voice. Burnard constructs her characters using quotidian details – Sandra has strong fingernails, Jude has a good eye for art, Colleen makes a point of dressing well because she spends so much of her time in nursing scrubs – but with so little depiction of the characters engaging with one another or the outside world, these details add up to less than the sum of their parts.

The problem with Suddenly is not with the lives of these girls and women, but rather that not enough of their lives is present. The power of Sandra’s death is lost because we have little to measure it against.