[In the following review, Hulbert offers tempered evaluation of The Company of Women.]

Like being singled out as a child to be the object of others' great love and hope, writing an acclaimed first novel can be a mixed blessing. Great expectations loom forever after. To judge from the importance of special daughters in Mary Gordon's fiction, she seems to have known the first fate, and has no doubt learned the second during the three years since her excellent first novel, Final Payments, was published. A second novel faces the challenge of showing new promise without betraying any of the old.

In The Company of Women Gordon pursues the theme she developed in Final Payments: a much-loved daughter's experience of the conflict between the anachronistic Catholic world she grows up in and the sexually liberated, politically radical America of the 1960s and 1970s she finds beyond it. Among the host of almost formulaic contemporary novels by women about women in search of love, Final Payments stood out for its depiction of working-class Catholic life, where a more demanding drama of giving and receiving love unfolded. Under the sway of the church, Gordon's women were ready to dedicate their lives to others—not to husbands or lovers, but to parents, children, one another, and priests. Now Gordon seems to be elaborating a formula of her own. Not only does she keep to her original theme, she also constructs a similar structure. Both Isabel Moore in Final Payments and Felicitas Maria Taylor in The Company of Women venture forth from their Catholic haven, no longer fortified by the faith but irrevocably influenced by Catholicism's unfashionable mores. They try out the ordinary world and are made unhappy in love. In trouble, they retreat to a new version of their former lives.

Where Gordon ventures beyond her own model is in narrative technique. In her first novel Gordon had Isabel tell her story in the first person, which she did with authority and wit. Gordon's prose was strikingly crafted, full of carefully chosen words, observations, and ironies, especially throughout the first part of Isabel's tale—the 11 years she spent nursing her fiercely orthodox father, just the two of them in their dark house in Queens, until he died when she was 30. In The Company of Women young Felicitas has six collaborators telling the first section of her story, which takes place in the summer of 1969: her mother, four of her mother's friends, and a priest, Father Cyprian, who is spiritual mentor to all of them and surrogate father to the child （whose real father is long dead）. As an omniscient narrator this time, Gordon never stands far back. Instead she projects herself into each of her characters in turn, looking through their eyes, speaking in their voices.

Gordon's ambitious narrative effort, however, does not succeed in opening out onto a more crowded Catholic scene. Unhappily, Gordon's new company seems to be composed of characters lifted from the periphery of Isabel's world in Final Payments to stand on their own nearer the center of the new novel, which it soon becomes clear they're not substantial enough to do. Felicitas's mother, Charlotte, remarks on a penchant of Father Cyprian's, which Gordon unfortunately shares:

Cyprian thought she was stupid. That was what he meant when he said, ‘Charlotte is the salt of the earth.’ He had to do that with people, have that one little sentence about everyone, as if he couldn't remember who was who without it. She was the salt of the earth and Elizabeth was one of God's doves and Clare had a mind like a man's and Mary Rose was a ray of sunlight and Muriel was an extraordinary soul.

Since these women, even stolid Charlotte, view themselves largely in Cyprian's terms, they tend to offer variations on his little epithets when Gordon gives them their chance to come forward. Not surprisingly, this makes for prose that is stylized and uneven, and characters who are closer to types than to fully imagined selves—and familiar types at that. Elizabeth and Clare are like maiden-aunt versions of, respectively, dreamy Eleanor and manly Liz, Isabel's best friends. Whining Muriel is a parody of Margaret in the earlier novel, who was a parody of the spinster with a martyr complex. Even Charlotte, whose personality is rounded out by the other characters' views of her, often lapses into caricatured saltiness when she speaks in her own voice, which Gordon loads with clichéd colloquialisms, “hells,” and “goddamns.” And Father Cyprian is cut from the same fierce, flawed, God-like cloth as Isabel's father; this adamant anti-sentimentalist who for years has been the anchor in the lives of these women is less compelling in the flesh than Mr. Moore was in Isabel's memory.

Only Felicitas, a younger and plainer version of Isabel, comes fully to life through others' doting visions of her and through her own voice, which inspires some of Gordon's best prose: “She believed she was worthy. Her soul she saw as glass filled with sky or water, as beautiful, as light, as silvery and important. That was her soul, light let through some transparent thing, cool light refreshed by water.” This serious 14-year-old lives for the summers spent among the odd company in the New York countryside, for the trip to six p.m. mass in the red pickup alone with Father Cyprian, talking about the splendor of God, the illusory beauty of nature, the turpitude of mankind—though she would never dream of admitting this joy to the friends she has made back at school in Brooklyn.

But six years later at Columbia, at the height of student radicalism, a rebellious Felicitas is ready to ridicule those joys to win the approval of the liberated friends she is desperate to have. As in Final Payments, Gordon's ironic sense and psychological insight are thrown off their accurate course when she turns from the outdated virginal enclave to portray the secular world beyond it. Her version of the 1960s scene is a superficial caricature rather than a penetrating parody. Robert Cavendish, Felicitas's political science professor and seducer, is ludicrous from the moment he strides into class and starts pontificating about “St. Herbert” （Marcuse）. Out of class he's even worse, as he generously donates his beautiful body to the cause of promoting “revolutionary consciousness” through sex—naturally without the “possessiveness trip.” Robert's physique simply is not enough to explain why the once discriminating （often outright intolerant） Felicitas should fall for him and, with uncharacteristic piety, receive his attentions as “a blessing.” Occasionally she has flashes of her old judgmental self and pierces the self-righteous vacuity of the Columbia crowd with jokes, which of course they never get. But mostly she suffers Robert's abuse, convinced she's happy and free for the first time. Only when she finds she's pregnant does she turn back to her Catholic company in misery and need.

They take her in and give her their unconditional love, which they also give her child, yet another in the line of special daughters “whose family life is peculiar.” Gordon's feminine geneology is becoming all too familiar. But behind it lies a typology of love that gives Gordon's novels their uncommon clarity: the fierce love of God and the charity for all souls dictated by the Catholic faith; the selective but unswerving human love that flourishes in families, among friends （companies of women in Gordon's books）; the sexual love between men and women. The fate of Gordon's heroines （unlike her other characters） is to know the competing claims of all three kinds of love and ultimately to choose the circumscribed love of a devoted enclave, which they took for granted when young and come to value, stoically rather than joyfully, in maturity. It is, as Felicitas says, an “isolated, difficult and formal” life, an anomaly in the “ordinary” world, where love is distributed differently. There, as Gordon showed in Final Payments, charity is left to government, which dispenses it “without the weights of love.” And there, as she shows this time, sexual love is easy, indiscriminate. But that world knows little of the steadfast love among close souls. Despite the weaknesses of her second effort, Gordon clearly is an authority on such loyal companies.