Word: gordons
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...Gordon structures her new book much like her first. Both begin with a woman raised in unusual and confining Catholic circumstances. In Women, Felicitate is surrounded by five unmarried adults, and in Payments Isabel devotes a decade to her father. In both, the lead woman is relieved of her chains in Payments by a death in the family, in Women by open rebellion. Felicitas, like Isabel, recognizes her lost youth and feels misplaced and uncomfortable in a world she is unfamiliar with. Both strike out, have unsuccessful but sexually educational affairs, and finally, both move back toward the spiritual womb...
...Gordon divides The Company of Women into a triptych. Part I begins in 1963 with five middle-aged working women loyally flocking to the weekend retreat of Father Cyprian, an unsentimental, uncompromisingly pure priest who has settled in upstate New York. This is the company of women, secular nuns who kneel before their earthly Savior, whom they depend on for comfort, for succor, for sweetness, for confession. They are prisoners of the vision of God and the light of heaven. They are bound by a hunger for the sacred which Cyprian provides with effusion and fanatical authority...
...depiction of Robert, the radical lecturer in chukka boots, we see Gordon's severest weakness: her drawing of male figures. All her men are foils for her heroines. Incomplete and inconsequential, they serve for Felicitas and Isabel to learn another part of the unvirtuous secular and as love objects for those women who leave the Church. All Gordon's men are childish and petulant, unworthy of love and eventually discarded...
...Gordon seems to see friendships as the most interesting and fruitful relations. In Payments. Isabel's relationships with two girlhood friends is critical, and female friendships are the central focus of Women. Father Cyprian's retreat participants are quite different sorts and brought together initially only through their association with him. Yet, a successful businesswoman shares her experience with and draws comfort from a simple housewife...
...Gordon's heterosexual encounters are not only unsuccessful for their participants but for Gordon's writing. It is inevitable that these sections see Gordon forget her female characterizations. Psychologically perceptive and wonderfully introspective women suddenly become sprawling and cooing estrogen victims. Felicitas escapes the 60s and her lovers as a sinner and by Part III(1977) she is back in New York State in the company of women...