Word: isabell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Final Payments had a simple and compelling story. Isabel Moore spends eleven years caring for a deeply religious and dying father. Her life during this time is inevitable and straightforward: "care of an invalid has this great virtue: one never has to wonder what there is to do. Even the tedium has its seduction: empty time has always been earned...
When her father dies, Isabel must invent an existence for herself and fill expanses of time never before regarded. "I would wake in the morning frightened, wondering how I would fill the hours until it was time to sleep again." We are left to watch a 30 year-old woman who has never functioned as a free adult grope for a normal life...
...unavoidable responsibilities and equally unavoidable satisfactions of family, though the world according to Gordon was quite different from Irving's literary Astrodome. Readers of Final Payments found themselves in a small house in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, Archie Bunker country without one-liners. The heroine, Isabel Moore, had spent all of her 20s caring for her invalid father, a man impacted with hatred for liberalism and the non-Catholic world...
...Moore is dead, but his flagellating spirit lives on in Gordon's second novel. So, too, do Isabel's intelligence, spunk and moral seriousness. Father Cyprian and Felicitas Taylor of The Company of Women extend the author's exploration into the value of sacrifice and tradition. The novel's structure is as formal as Gordon's sense of the hierarchy that governs the lives of her characters...
Relatives of Desaparecidos interviewed seemed to agree that although Isabel Peron's 1973-76 regime paralleled Videla's brutal extermination of students, leftists, and intellectuals, its death-squad was more straightforward about its deeds. "At least they wore uniforms, at least they phoned the newspapers to tell them what they did," one woman said. "But now you get the feeling there's evil lurking under the surface that's not being admitted...