Word: gordons
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...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...
...Mary Gordon's Dover Road was actually a heavily Catholic section of Valley Stream, L.I. Her mother, "a nice Catholic girl" and now a legal secretary, has lived in the same house for 58 years. Mary, who is 29, sometimes feels, like Isabel, that the most interesting part of her life is her past. Her father's family were the only Jews in Lorain, Ohio. They managed to send their son to Harvard, but he dropped out and knocked around Europe for a few years. Says Mary: "He once started a girlie magazine called Hot Dog. When...
...alive, I was O.K., I was terrific," says Mary. "Afterward I was a mess. What I secretly knew was important was not important to anyone else." A world of intellect and glamour seemed enragingly beyond grasp. There was certainly no trace of it in parochial schools. Mary Gordon recalls the chants of chemistry class: "What does covalent bonding remind us of?" "The mystical body of Christ...
...generation who led sacrificed lives for someone in their family. There is a terrible human need when the body conks out, but no one in my generation gives over his life. I began by wondering what would happen." After the book was turned down by a couple of publishers, Gordon took it around to her Barnard teacher, Critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Her advice was to switch the narrative from the third to the first person. It took three months and transformed the book...
...Mary Gordon is frightened about the money that she is making-$300,000 from the paperback sale, for example. "I deserve something, but not all that," she muses. She will take a trip to Spain, teach a course on the religious novel at Amherst next year, finish a new book and "look into causes that need help" if that money piles up too high. First, like Isabel after her liberation, she will buy some clothes at Bloomingdale...