Word: isabell
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...foundation gave the endowment fund to Harvard in honor of the founders of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Ethel and Jack Hausman and Isabel and Leonard H. Goldenson...
...novel in which the heroine is supposed to be liberating herself, Final Payments is surprisingly sexist. Having never freed herself from the outdated dreams of her solitary years, Isabel flings herself at almost any man. Her father always was the "strong...
Such a confession seems relatively powerful compared with the tedious sex symbolism attached to Liz's husband, with whom Isabel "commits adultery." With the trashy, soft-core pornographic cliches, this episode strikes one as hilariously funny, regardless of the author's intentions...
...Isabel's final true love is as flat a character as can be. He turns out to be precisely that "slick hustler" who explains her life to her and tries to lead her from extreme orgies of self-abnegation to the moderate pleasures of middle-class womanhood...
Especially in the middle of the novel, Gordon's prose--saturated with adjectives; empty, if not revolting characters; and lurid sexual details--reads like something out of Mademoiselle or Ladies' Home Journal (in both she has published short stories). but when Margaret, Isabel's old housekeeper, reappears towards the end, the writing tightens up again. Margaret practically embodies that stubborn, un-American subculture, which the author seems to identify with Catholicism. Even if Final Payments lacks a clear message and Mary Gordon's language often crumples under the weight of her cliches, at least one gets the sense...