Word: isabell
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...Isabel skips eagerly out of her eleven-year retirement. Helped by two old Dover Road pals who have since quit the neighborhood, she soon has smart clothes and a social service job in upstate New York. She sells the house, moves, and falls lyrically in love with a married...
Then everything turns inside out. She realizes that what interests people most about her is her bizarre and medieval past. The do-gooder work helps no one. Her lover's wife confronts her, screaming, "You're a good person." Isabel flees her whole new world. There will be another job and another man for her, but before that she must go back to Margaret Casey. It was not the old woman's spiteful tongue, her sloth, her mawkish novenas or her copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger that Isabel hated. It was that her father loved Margaret...
...Final Payments is a lower-class Death of the Heart, in its controlled structure and in the daring with which both writers force collisions of conscience and will. But perhaps the most heartening aspect of the new book is one that is almost incidental to it, the passages about Isabel and the two women friends who help her. The moments of warmth and the strains that gradually heal are written with openness and unselfconsciousness. It is as if the painfully aggressive voices of the past decade had finally been heard, understood and absorbed...
Mary Gordon's Dover Road was actually a heavily Catholic section of Valley Stream, L.I. Her mother, "a nice Catholic girl" and now a legal secretary, has lived in the same house for 58 years. Mary, who is 29, sometimes feels, like Isabel, that the most interesting part of her life is her past. Her father's family were the only Jews in Lorain, Ohio. They managed to send their son to Harvard, but he dropped out and knocked around Europe for a few years. Says Mary: "He once started a girlie magazine called Hot Dog. When...
...example. "I deserve something, but not all that," she muses. She will take a trip to Spain, teach a course on the religious novel at Amherst next year, finish a new book and "look into causes that need help" if that money piles up too high. First, like Isabel after her liberation, she will buy some clothes at Bloomingdale...