[In the following review, Pritchard offers praise for The Finishing School, which he concludes is Godwin's "best novel."]

The "finishing school" is in fact an old stone hut by a pond in Clove township, upstate New York, where at the beginning of her 15th year and over the course of an extraordinary summer, Justin Stokes comes of age. The agent who plants formative aspirations within her is Ursula DeVane, an unmarried woman of 44 who—with her reclusive brother Julian, a talented concert pianist reduced to giving lessons to neighborhood children—lives in her father's old house and grounds, selling off his acres as economic necessity directs. By contrast with Ursula's rootedness, Justin has been painfully uprooted. Her own father recently dead, she has been wrenched from the established routines of a comfortable home in Virginia and relocated in the unfamiliar and largely unappealing confines of Lucas Meadows—a small community most of whose members work for IBM, eight miles away in Kingston, New York.

Justin, her mother, and younger brother live with her aunt Mona and cousin Becky in a house which is, alas, everything Ursula DeVane's is not (it has seafoam wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room, protected by clear plastic runners leading to the various sitting places). Aunt Mona has redone Justin's room for her in what the girl, with a sense of the aesthetically trashy, has intolerantly dubbed "Raspberry Ice." Within its confines, lonely and yearning for her lost past and her as yet uncertain future, Justin reaches out in imagination to the freedom, the cultural style, which Ursula comes increasingly to embody.

These are some of the materials which Gail Godwin in her sixth novel (she has also published two collections of shorter fiction) has woven into an engaging, shapely narrative of cumulative power. There is nothing unfamiliar in her material. At least since Lawrence's The Rainbow, in the relationship of that other Ursula with her "beloved, subtly-intimate teacher" Winifred Inger, we have had literary treatments of the love between aspiring girl and mature, "advanced" woman (Winifred Inger is interested in the "Women's Movement"). Gail Godwin writes with none of the steamy abandon Lawrence lavishes on Ursula and Winifred's nocturnal swim together (although her Ursula does attempt, without success, to get Justin to swim with her in "their" pond), and her narrative voice is much more carefully modulated than Lawrence's eventually monotonous and rather external presentation. Godwin creates nuance and variety by making Justin speak through different voices: the fulfilled actress she has become, now haunted by a moment from her past and meditating upon it; but also the young Justin, speaking to us from present urgency, having fallen under the spell of a powerful woman. Yet this young Justin also recalls a younger one, as events from her previous life in Virginia with grandparents, father, and mother are reviewed. Some words of hers from the novel describe well its technique:

In following the natural flow of my memories as they leap forward, then draw back, then leap forward again, I am digressing from what I want to do most. I want to go back and claim the girl I was—the girl Ursula DeVane chose for her special friend, that summer in Clove. I want to take myself through the summer as it unfolded, no conscious lies or glossings-over, but only the wisdom of retrospect.

But interestingly enough such wisdom is exactly what the novel shows to be impossible, or at least emptily abstract and pious in character. To believe in its secure attainment is to exhibit a naiveté comparable to that revealed at one moment in the book when Justin, looking at her youthful face and body in the mirror, and with a sense of her whole life ahead, tells us that

it seemed perfectly possible to me … that with resolution and a little prudent foresight—and from learning from the example of people like Ursula—I could get through life without ever committing any act that would haunt me later.

This delusory hope the novel exposes, yet does so in a way that is free from gloating or heavy-handed irony. John Updike says in his memoir. The Dogwood Tree, that in maturity he found no certain substitutes for the misguided assumptions of childhood. In a similar manner, The Finishing School shows the wisdom of retrospect to be no more sustaining or invulnerable to attack than the "prudent foresight" of youth.

There are various stylistic means by which Gail Godwin refuses to over-invest in any single, "true" point of view or nugget of meaning. As the narrative leaps forward and draws back, as the narrator shifts from one age-perspective to another, events recur and are retold with different emphasis, and by way of making our awareness more complicated. Rather than presenting the young Justin's experience in a relatively direct way, her older self overlays it with all the qualifications and hesitations of alternative ways of talking:

As I review these memories in painstaking detail, trying to see what was true and not flinch from those truths, I've even speculated whether my "possessed" behavior toward Ursula was a semiconsciously contrived ploy on my part to make my mother see that she ought to have taken me away from Clove. But no, that's going too far; that would make me a monster, like little Mary Tilford in The Children's Hour who wrecks a school and the lives of two women in order to keep from being sent back to the school. I was not a monster—not that kind of monster, anyway. I told no lies: I even kept from my mother the extent of my preoccupation with Ursula. I loved Ursula more than my mother that summer, and I didn't want my mother to know it.

And so on, giving somewhat the effect of Eliot's notion of ironic wit as "a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible."

Yet it would be wrong to overstress the complications and difficulty of this novel, since it is distinguished throughout by a lucid and unpretentious gravity of speech, its narrative voice giving us confidence as it conveys—in Lionel Trilling's useful formulation—"both the modulation and the living form of what is being said." This is, quite simply, a voice one likes and trusts, and it lives just as convincingly in the incidental details of place and person as in larger and more thematic concerns. For example, the voice is filled with IBM lore ("I've Been Moved" as the quip has it), attaching itself to the Kingston and Poughkeepsie operations of that company. (One instance: Thomas J. Watson Sr., visiting the men's room at the Poughkeepsie site, found an employee disregarding the "Please Wash Hands Before Returning To Work" sign. When the founder of IBM asked the employee why he ignored the sign, the man explained that "I'm not going back to work, I'm going to lunch.") The portrait of Justin's fat friend Joan, who invites her for a swim in her swimming pool but declines to participate herself ("You just swim all you want," she said in her mild, uninflected voice, "and I'll sit up here under the umbrella and watch you"—and so she does, in her "jumbo-sized suit"), is humorous and even poignant, without a trace of clever "satiric" narrative showing-off. So is the portrait of "Mott"—Justin's aunt's ex-spouse (and an IBMer), who unknowingly precipitates the book's painful denouement. There is a thoroughly believable and sympathetic account of Justin's first Broadway show, which turns out to be, luckily for her, My Fair Lady. And, appropriate to a book the sound of whose narrative voice is crucial, there are delicately noted bits of music, played splendidly (or butchered) by Ursula's brother (or his pupils): Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata; Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz"; Chopin's B Flat Scherzo; "Happy Birthday to You" and "Dixie."

"That is the power of the artist, you see," says Ursula to the young Justin: "If you are an artist you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes. That's the secret all true artists come to know." Gail Godwin has learned the secret and trapped it in this, her best novel. Shorter and more tightly controlled than the overlong though often absorbing A Mother and Two Daughters, The Finishing School develops the first person voice used in her novella "Mr. Bedford" (in Mr. Bedford and the Muses) into a narrative of humanly impressive energies, as happy-sad in its texture as life itself may be said to be. Its sympathies and ironies are equally directed at all, irrespective of age or sex, and it is wholly empty of rancor or shrillness or mean-mindedness. For those reasons it helps us, as Wallace Stevens said poetry should do, to live our lives.