Word: isabell
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...SHOOTING PARTY by Isabel Colegate Viking; 195 pages...
...crisp fall weather. The month is October and the year is 1913. A novel set in this place and time automatically creates a reserve of ready-made poignancy: the insular, comfortable people of the period had no idea what the guns of August 1914 would bring. But Author Isabel Colegate does not exploit this sentiment. The coming Great War is, naturally, a fact of which her characters are unaware, and so, except for a few vague anxieties, they cannot think of it. They have other concerns. Sir Randolph worries whether the beaters will be able to flush a sufficient number...
...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...
...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...