Word: gordons
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Then again, these are stereotypical Catholic lives. They are lives filled with loneliness, exhaustion, and fear; fear of God, fear of loss, fear of sin. There is no horseplay in a Gordon novel, no exorbitant fantasy. There is no security for her characters, they do not enjoy life, all stability outside the Church is illusory. The Catholic formula prevails: passion brings scandal, scandal brings dishonor, dishonor brings withdrawal and isolated solace. Gordon's characters are unhappy, but never trapped, they simply have nowhere else to go. Isabel Moore nurses her father for eleven years and is never self-pitying. That...
...MARY GORDON'S SECOND NOVEL, The Company of Women reads like a prayer. As in her first book. Final Payments, she writes about relentlessly serious Catholics who are raised to hate the world in order to love God. They are those who feel a constant duty sacrifice, and their religious abnegation becomes nearly masochistic...
Second novels never come easy. Especially when faced with the task of matching a masterful premiere. In Women, Gordon is more ambitious but less successful than Payments. She is just as precise, just as subtle, just as compassionate as before; her talents are unquestionable. But so are her weaknesses...
...Women lacks such an urgent plot. If Final Payments is a beautifully told and moving story. Women is simply beautifully told. But the dearth of plot is retarding, as all movement is internal. There is little dialogue--used mostly to drop one-liners--and limited action. Nowhere is Gordon s plot problem clearer than in her inability to end Women. There, breaking from the style of rest of the book, she lets her characters reveal their inner feelings in their own words. Except for one figure, her style only serves as a distraction, an afterthought like a eulogy...
...books. Gordon's characters have simple lives--lives structured by responsibilities, demands, duties and desires. They capture us because Gordon has a passion for the familiar and an original look to reveal it. Her eye catches the minutiae of life and twists them like needlepoint into a design of the ordinary...