[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt offers unfavorable assessment of Spending.]

“Where are the male Muses?” asks Monica Szabo at the end of the slide show of her paintings that begins Mary Gordon's new novel, Spending: A Utopian Divertimento.

“Right here,” answers the man in the audience whom Monica chooses to call simply B in her account of the unusual love affair they are about to begin.

B is a feminist's fantasy come to life. A highly successful trader of commodities futures, he has bought four of Monica's paintings and fallen in love with her from afar. He believes her to be “a very, very good painter” who one day “might be great” if only she had the advantages of the great male artists of history.

“What do you think you need that would give you the optimum conditions for work?” he asks her.

“Space and time,” she answers.

So they undertake the experiment that B proposes: that he become her patron and muse in every possible sense of those words.

In her earlier novels, Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels and The Other Side, Ms. Gordon was preoccupied with self-sacrifice. Now in the character of Monica Szabo, she has created a woman who not only wants it all back but also thinks it her due because she is an artist and a superior being.

Of course, Monica has certain qualms about her arrangement with B. As the egalitarian-minded daughter of working-class parents （her father was a baker）, she insists she is uncomfortable with money and privilege. Worse, since she and B have immediately become lovers, for her to take money from him puts her in the position of a prostitute, or a “sex worker,” as one of her twin daughters prefers to call it. And since B is sleeping with her anyway, shouldn't he also pose for her, as the lovers of the great male artists always did?

Yet thanks to a remarkable capacity for self-forgiveness, she manages to overcome these difficulties. Despite her supposed discomfort with luxury, she seems to know all about the best stores, restaurants, hotels and great cities in Europe. The pattern of her protests suggests that once she has aired her objections to accepting B's sexual attentions and money, she is free to do so to her heart's content. “I think the most important thing to say about why I did everything I did was that I always felt he liked me a great deal,” she explains somewhat lamely.

As for his posing for her: “Can I think about it?” he asks.

“Yes, but not too long,” she responds, only half teasing. “And you really need to bear in mind that you have a responsibility to do it. It's part of your bargain, remember. Think of all those women taking off their clothes for all those men. Think of all you have to make up for.”

“The way you put it is so subtle, so full of possibility. I suppose I have no choice.”

Despite Monica's excesses as a character, her story does draw the reader in after a hundred pages or so. Looking at B's sleeping, naked form, she conceives a series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art are not dead but postorgasmic. The resulting show wins her sales, fame, controversy and a second patron, who offers her still greater wealth and inspires her to further invention.

At the novel's high point, Monica goes on the “Charlie Rose Show” and defends her “Spent Men” series against a Roman Catholic critic who considers them blasphemous. “All I'm saying is that, as an artist, the way I look at what's before my eyes is partly determined by what other artists have seen before me,” she declares. “I don't understand why that's a mockery.”

But Monica wears on you after a while. Her assumptions of superiority and moral rationalizations become insufferable. Her concluding comparison of herself to a conquering emperor sounds megalomaniac, and the context in which she does this, namely during her preparations for a climactic celebratory party, recalls the far better written novel by Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway.” As for the sex she has with B: there is so much of it that you begin to feel exhausted on behalf of the characters. This may be the first novel I've ever read where you skim the sex scenes to find the talky parts.

Finally, you have to ask, is what happens to Monica all that it would take to produce the great painter she clearly thinks she has become, or would several generations of a restructured society be required to fulfill the conditions she implies are needed to create great female artists? Whatever the answer, the connection between her experience and her sudden flowering is hard to see. Given her self-assertiveness, she seems just as likely to have discovered herself without the attentions of B.

As for what her self-assertiveness does to the novel, one can't help noting her comments on a Vermeer show she visits at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. （Despite her egalitarian belief that everyone should have equal access to Vermeer, she painfully accepts an invitation to see the exhibit before what she refers to as “the ordinary viewers” arrive.）

At the show, she is inspired by what she sees not because she wants to “paint like Vermeer in the technical sense.” She continues: “What I wanted was more an example of something I would have to call moral; that sense of his getting out of the way of his own vision, of not coming between the spectator and what the spectator wanted to see, the graciousness of a withdrawal so complete that there was space between the viewer and the image that made room for the whole world. I was thinking about how to bring silence into my paintings.”

Because of Monica's almost bullying presence in her story, there is no space for the spectator to see what really is happening. There is no silence for the reader to hear. Which is probably just as well, because without Monica's self-inflation, Spending might easily collapse into nothing.