Word: gordon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FINAL PAYMENTS by Mary Gordon Random House; 297 pages...
Final Payments, the best first novel in many months, begins at old Joe Moore's funeral. At the graveside are weeping priests. Mary Gordon knows the Irish Catholic enclaves of New York lethally well. The priests had been her father's companions, drinking for hours in his house and arguing about baptism of desire. Moore himself was a militant soldier of Christ and a right-wing fanatic: "His sympathies were with the South in the Civil War and the Spanish Fascists." But if his opinions were unfashionable and possibly barbaric, he knew something about the nature...
...lives trying to keep a little space at the edge of the table. From the opening rites of burial, laced with fine Irish malice, the reader relaxes, secure in the hands of a confident writer. That assurance lasts right through the book, although Final Payments is an ambitious debut. Gordon goes beyond any formulas about sheltered young women entering the churning world and learning through suffering. Isabel is a sympathetic but varied character. What she says of her father applies to her as well: "His mind had the brutality of a child's or an angel...
...Gordon is to be linked with her elders and betters, the closest is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen. In some ways, Final Payments is a lower-class Death of the Heart, in its controlled structure and in the daring with which both writers force collisions of conscience and will. But perhaps the most heartening aspect of the new book is one that is almost incidental to it, the passages about Isabel and the two women friends who help her. The moments of warmth and the strains that gradually heal are written with openness and unselfconsciousness. It is as if the painfully aggressive...
...publication will contain several original and translated poems, short stories, book reviews and essays on topics including Japanese investment in the U.S., Chinese intellectual history in the 17th century, Oriental woodcut art and the role of women and the family in modern Japan, Andrew D. Gordon '74, a third-year graduate student and chairman of the colloquium, said yesterday...