Word: isabel
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...book opens after Isabel, the heroine, has spent thirty years of her life in a small Irish Catholic community near Manhattan. We see the orthodox funeral of her invalid father, to whom the devoted her past eleven years as her mind records...
Right from the start, Isabel admits the "murderous" influence of her father as readily as she acknowledges the importance of her upbringing in an oppressive Catholic subculture. In the course of Final Payments, Isabel, always tempted by sweets, lipstick, and high heels, reacts ambivalently to both influences. She is simultaneously sarcastic and sympathetic, resentful and grateful...
...Isabel is self-aware enough to draw parallels between her father's ideal and her own anachronistic choice to become a "saint" by sacrificing her youth to the care of a cripple. She questions the purity of her motives--makes her saintliness appear sinful and her vices sacremental. In retrospect she sees her decision to lose her virginity, for instance, as nothing but an attempt to shock her father into attention. Incestuous lovehate fro him made her sleep with his (only) disciple; perhaps she even intended to trigger her father's heart attack a few months later...
...Payments, then, lies the desire for complete control over life, for the purity and self-discipline that bring absolute certainty. There is something unique about a modern heroine who can take seriously the conflict between a religious yearning for clarity and the temptation of transient physical pleasures. Unfortunately, when Isabel tries "shaping" her life in the outside world, both she and the book seem to get lost in the muddle...
...interviewing those paid to care for the elderly, introduces her to many new people. But in an already cluttered, lengthy novel, this endless procession of new characters does little more than add confusion and tedium. Even Isabel's closest friends--Eleanor, a flighty sensualist, and Liz, a strong-willed lesbian--are not terribly interesting until they are forced to confront each other...