Word: cyprian
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Orbiting around the book is the Roman Catholic faith. Its influence is inescapable, especially on Father Cyprian, a priest whose asceticism and reactionary views make him unwelcome in a liberalized church. He has, instead, a private, unofficial congregation: five single working women...
Felicitas, daughter of one of the women, is the group's only child. With her own father dead, the 14-year-old girl seeks paternal affection and security from Cyprian. He gives her that and more. He guides her education in Latin and Greek and arms her with orthodoxy: "This beauty all around us modern man mistakes for God," he tells her on a drive through the countryside. He denounces the love of nature as pantheism, "a particularly American error," and goes on to warn Felicitas that she will come to know the rottenness...
Part III, the concluding section of the novel, finds Felicitas, her mother, baby Linda, Father Cyprian and his faithful band living near one another in western New York. Prodigal daughter and priest now talk about home improvements, not theology. For physical comfort, Felicitas has Leo, a kind, oxlike hardware store owner to whom she proposes marriage while killing bats. Here is Gordon's prose at its finely detailed, rhythmic best: "There were 16 bats, trying to lift themselves off the ground, trying, failing, bringing their wings together in desperation, raising themselves an inch, two inches, then falling. They moved...
...same strengths and weaknesses as Final Payments. Both novels succeed on the durability and intelligence of central characters who command respect. Both novels have a tendency to slip into lugubriousness and slick schematism. Felicitas' college days contain too much stock footage from the dopey '60s, and though Cyprian's followers illustrate the spiritual dependency of women in a male-dominated church, they remain only illustrations - sketches of romanticized stoicism...
...unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe. I don't want that for Linda. I had Cyprian, but he fathered me as if we were both bodiless, for our connection had nothing in it of the flesh. But I will sleep with Leo, Linda will know that. And Leo will -know that Linda is an ordinary child, a child of flesh and bone...