is stricken and decides she must, once again, sacrifice her life in order to pay for her sins. To do so, she goes to live with Margaret Casey, who had been housekeeper for Isabel and her father until Isabel, at thirteen years of age, discovered that Margaret had designs on her father and threw the woman out of the house. With Margaret, whom Isabel has always despised, she finds, she believes, the perfect sacrifice—to love the unlovable. Isabel tries her best to deal with Margaret until Father Mulcahy convinces her that her sacrifice is without meaning and that she is slowly killing herself. Recognizing the truth in what he says, Isabel “pays” Margaret the twenty thousand dollars she received for the sale of her father’s house and returns to her friends Eleanor and Liz to regain her self-respect and renew her life.

Men and Angels

Although Gordon’s second novel, The Company of Women, deals with many of the Catholic topics present in Final Payments, it received mixed reviews upon publication. A series of monologues by Father Cyprian and his female disciples, the novel is primarily the story of the youth and maturing of Felicitas Taylor; in this work, Gordon introduces such issues as abortion and social activism. In her third novel, Men and Angels, Gordon moves away from Catholicism to a more general look at moral and religious questions. Anne Foster, a mother with a Harvard Ph.D., has the opportunity to write a catalog for an exhibition by the dead painter Caroline Watson (a character loosely based on several female artists). She must decide whether to accompany her husband to France, where he is to teach for a year, or to pursue her own career as an art historian. She decides to remain in the United States and hires Laura Post to care for her children while she works. Although she instinctively dislikes Laura, Anne is blind to the real danger that Laura, a religious fanatic, presents to her children. Because she desperately needs Laura’s help as a caretaker, Anne continues to employ her.

During the year, Anne meets Caroline Watson’s daughter-in-law, Jane, for whom Caroline had been a wonderful surrogate mother, despite the fact that she had neglected her own son. Jane, childless herself, takes to Anne from the first and becomes the mother that Anne herself has needed. Laura, whose mother treated her cruelly, had fallen under the influence of charlatan preachers. When Anne begins an extramarital affair, Laura, who has idealized Anne as the perfect mother, decides to save her from her sins by harming the children. The considerable tension that develops in the novel stems from the reader’s perception of increasing danger to the children. Anne discovers that Laura, who borders on insanity, has deliberately allowed the children to play on thin ice. She dismisses Laura, who attempts suicide by cutting her wrists in Anne’s bathtub.

Men and Angels brings the mother-child relationship into sharp focus, raising questions about the emotional conflicts faced by talented, educated women who attempt to combine careers and motherhood. Feminist critics have praised the novel, Gordon’s best-selling work, as a rare exploration of the anguished choices faced by modern women as well as a study of the misery caused by motherhood gone wrong and the dangers of religious fanaticism.

Spending

Gordon’s fourth novel, The Other Side, has not received much critical scrutiny. In many ways her most interesting novel, it tells the story of a day in the life of aged Irish immigrants, Vincent and Ellen MacNamara, through their own interior monologues and those of their family members. Gordon’s next work of long fiction, Spending, presents a startling change in both style and theme from her previous novels. Artist Monica Szabo’s fantasy of sex and money seems at first to be a real departure from Gordon’s more overtly moral work. On closer examination, however, this novel—in its pulsing first-personnarrative, its interiority, and its concern with art and life and how women combine the two—may be seen more accurately as reflecting a maturing art that no longer has to apologize for its own being.

A successful artist, Monica is delivering a lecture at a gallery owned by a friend when she half-jokingly notes that male artists have always had the benefit of a Muse, the model-inspiration-housekeeper-cook-secretary who also pays the rent. Somewhat wistfully, she wonders where all the male Muses are and is shocked when a gentleman in the audience announces, “Right here.” This longtime admirer of Monica’s work, whom she refers to only as B, also tells her he is very wealthy and offers to become her patron to enable her to take a sabbatical from her job as a college professor to paint full time. Although she wonders if she is mad, Monica readily agrees.

B, a wealthy and handsome commodities trader, becomes everything that Monica has fantasized about and more. His “spent” (the wordplay is intentional) condition after sex reminds her of paintings of the dead Christ by the old masters. B thus provides the means, the inspiration, and the model for the series of paintings, “Spent Men,” that brings Monica her greatest acclaim. In his complete sacrifice of himself and his goods to Monica’s needs and desires, B, quite appropriately Jewish, becomes a Christ figure.

Along the way, their relationship metamorphoses as their individual fortunes change. On the heels of Monica’s successful show, B loses everything after investing in risky chocolate futures. Luckily, by this time Monica has been befriended by eighty-year-old Peggy Riordan, who had inherited a fortune from her lover of forty years. Peggy becomes Monica’s second Muse as well as the more appropriate mother to one of Monica’s twins, the conservative Sara. Wanting to divest herself of her assets before she and her current lover have to move into a retirement home, Peggy transfers the bulk of her fortune to Monica. Peggy’s resources, along with the savvy of Monica’s daughter Rachel (whose Brazilian boyfriend has a genius grandfather who predicts the fate of the coffee crop by examining the bark of the tree), save B’s business.

The novel ends with Monica’s celebration of B’s return to fortune and with her looking forward to beginning her next project, “After Ingres,” a series inspired by a trip to the Russian baths, her birthday present to Peggy. Monica has come to a full realization of the joys of love and work. In discussing Spending, critics have noted Gordon’s ability to write with wit and dark humor about women’s sensuality in this work, which is something of a departure from her previous fiction.

Pearl

Gordon’s sixth novel, Pearl, begins with Maria Meyers, a fiercely overbearing single mother in New York City, receiving an alarming telephone message on Christmas night, 1998. Maria’s twenty-year-old daughter Pearl has chained herself to the gates of the American embassy in Dublin, Ireland, and intends to starve herself to death. Pearl, a language student at Trinity College, has taken an Irish lover and is embroiled in the cause of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). She blames herself for the death of a disabled teenage boy, Stevie Donegan, and believes that her own death will be a public statement about the harm human beings cause each other. Joseph Kasperman, lifelong family friend of Maria and a father figure to Pearl, joins Maria in Ireland in the effort to rescue Pearl. The names of Maria and Joseph and the Christmas setting are symbolic. Critics have disagreed about the effectiveness of the unnamed narrator, who frequently challenges the reader by raising philosophical questions about the nature of human existence.

The fraught relationship between mother and daughter creates the tension in the novel; it is entirely possible that Pearl will die. Maria, angry and impetuous, descends on Dublin and the hospital where Pearl has been taken after being removed from her chains and is being fed intravenously against her will. Pearl’s physician, Dr. Hazel Morrisey, has little sympathy for Maria and enforces Pearl’s wish that her mother not be allowed to see her. Maria, rebelling against her father’s extreme Roman Catholic views, has raised Pearl without religious belief. Moreover, Maria is guilty of refusing to forgive her father before he died. She believes that Pearl, unaccountably, seeks martyrdom, while Dr. Morrisey treats her as a suicidal anorexic. Pearl herself believes she must be a public witness to her part in young Stevie’s death, an event that the reader understands as a tragic accident. The story is interwoven with the recent history of Ireland, primarily the starvation death of Bobby Sands and other IRA martyrs.

Pearl has refused food for six weeks and is emotionally indifferent, nearing the critical point beyond which death will be inevitable. The narrator asks the reader to make a judgment: Which of the two, Maria or Pearl, is making the morally justified choice? Both are strong-willed. Maria, fighting her daughter’s wish to die, believes that “she has failed in the most important thing a mother can do for a child: to give her hope in life.” Pearl, equally determined, tears out her feeding tube, an excruciatingly painful act. Pearl is ultimately saved by the Irish doctor’s forceful treatment and the life-giving stories told by Tom, the shy medical student assigned to prevent Pearl from harming herself. Joseph, after a mistaken attempt to intervene, leaves Pearl and Maria to their reconciliation in an emotional scene that moves from tears to laughter.

Gordon tackles an astounding range of universal human concerns in this novel, from the need for unconditional forgiveness of those who have wronged us to the tragedy of fanatic idealism that destroys human life. To the ultimate question of the meaning of existence raised by the novel, Maria can only respond with her belief that human beings are meant to live. The narrator has the final word, answering the question of how Maria, Joseph, and Pearl will live out the rest of their lives: “We will hope for the best.”