Word: isabell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chair to one side of the fireplace, where he customarily talks to visitors. The office is well proportioned: 18-ft. ceilings and six high arches containing the windows and doors. The paintings vary?an uninteresting abstract consisting of parallel lines; a Matisse of a languishing nude; a study by Isabel Bishop of "Two Girls," young women really, the one in the red hat looking concerned toward the one in the black hat, who is holding a letter, perhaps conveying bad news. The room is a trove of bric-a-brac: a bogus Oscar inscribed to "Ed Koch, Mayor for Life...
...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 she and her father live in a one-family house in Queens "strikes everyone in our decade a unusual, barbarous, cruel. To me, it was not only inevitable but natural... We were rare in our situation, but not unique...
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...
...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...