Word: isabell
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...