[In the following review, Broner offers favorable assessment of Spending.]

Mary Gordon has always taken on strong enemies: the church, memory, family. She is not averse to taking on the big bad boys either. Reviewing Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Sonlast year in The Nation, she wondered how he “could have the audacity to do something there was no need to do … that no one particularly wanted, that he knew nothing about and that he wasn't well suited for.” Knocking out that kind of pugilistic male is no sweat for her.

She has created exactly the opposite in this book: a male supportive of the woman hero's work. Spending is a fairy tale with a Prince Charming （referred to as B, only named after he's earned it）. Cinderella is Monica Szabo, smart-mouthed, a gifted artist and independent woman with too little time, too many jobs and inadequate studio space. Later there will be a fairy godmother who will save both prince and princess.

The title is clearly about money and sex, both to the point of exhaustion and total consumption. The American Heritage Dictionary defines spend as “To pass （time） … To throw away, waste, squander, to pay out or expend money,” and spent as “consumed; used up; expended.” But Gordon is too sophisticated and knowledgeable to confine herself to definition. Monica insists on defining herself, all the time, to everyone, herself, her twin daughters and her “Muse,” the patron. （To him: “I didn't have to tell him that at my age I'd had rather a lot of sex. … ＼S］ometimes I wanted work more than love.”）

Monica throws out a challenge at a show of her work: Where oh where is the male muse? There have always been female muses, servicing their lovers with sex and food, used as objects, as models. We have trained our daughters to be muses but not our sons. Suddenly a man—handsome and wealthy, it goes without saying—raises his hand. He will be the Muse. It will solve everything.

But from then on the conflicts are between independence and accepting a patron, between counting one's time as one's own to make art and repaying the Muse by making time for love. The demands Monica makes of B enlarge. Soon she finds she needs him not only as patron and lover but as model.

Watching B spent, after sex, Monica reflects:

＼H］e was sitting like Jesus in Carpaccio's Meditation on Christ's Passion. That relaxed weight, the heaviness. The loss of regard. The position of the limbs, the hands and feet. … The face unexpressive. …

I began thinking about other dead Christs, Pontormo's, Mantegna's. … And suddenly, I had an idea. Suppose all those dead Christs weren't dead, just postorgasmic?

That is the beginning of her series of paintings, Spent Men, After the Masters. The idea is playful and outrageous: what can possibly happen next, the reader wonders? Because it's a fairy tale, of course the paintings are completed, the show is sold out, there are great reviews in the New York Times and Monica discomfits her opponent from the Catholic Defense League, both invited for a public sparring on the Charlie Rose Show.

Every scene is visual. Monica describes one of her works: there is a

kind of spacy gray green. And a shadow of a table. In the foreground, a man wearing only his underwear, a very beautiful pair of green and white striped silk boxer shorts. I had a wonderful time doing those shorts, the pearliness of the white, absorbing that dim light, and the green stripes, the green of an Anjou pear, but waxier. …

Only subtly do we learn that the model has an erection, “a lot of brush work, a swelling and then just the tenderest hint of pink.”

There is steamy and satisfying sex—on everything and everywhere: on beds, airplanes, movie theatres, on the Upper West Side, in a cottage on Cape Cod, in hotels in Washington, Milan and Rome. But in each place, there is also the satisfaction of looking for a long time at art—Vermeer in Washington at the National Gallery, or the Christs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in various museums in Italy where Monica's lover takes her for inspiration.

Everywhere the writer “paints” still lifes:

He laid the table on the deck with the yellow pottery. The table was cast-iron and glass, the chairs cast-iron. … He brought in royal blue place mats and napkins. The silver was Vienna Secessionist, I thought. There was coffee in a white pot, and a platter with slices of honeydew, cantaloupe and Persian melon arranged alternately.

One does not know which to enjoy more, the sexuality or the sensuality. Even the weather thrills:

It was 7:00, the twentieth of August. Two weeks before there wouldn't have been even a suggestion of dusk, but now there was and with it the slight anxiety of coming nightfall, or the end of one more precious summer day. The grass was damp and the air had a peppery smell.

Or the rare accuracy in the physicality of making of art:

My body felt used, worn out, fatigued, dirty, and yet overwrought. …

After working like that, I feel I have filth all over my hands, and at the same time I'm incandescent.

Monica is self-made, self-willed; she has always been responsible, moderate in her choices and independent. But now she changes from thrifty to spendthrift, gleefully going on spending sprees. In Milan she is offered clothing which “no living woman could possibly wear”:

Shoes made of glass and metal, skirts of feathers, jackets of acid green or kumquat leather. But then we saw the pearl gray camisole that turned us both on. He bought it for me; we didn't look at what it cost. He bought a belt. I bought a scarf, the color of blue hydrangeas.

They spend and spend, and suddenly there's no more. The Muse is not amused. And is doubly deprived of his power. What can possibly happen next? Only a reversal of fortune, a role change, will do.

Despite the fun, Spending is not a summer beach book—though it would certainly be a turn-on to read while being oiled on a beach towel. But it's too smart. （Monica says of B's ex-wife, “If Brillo could talk, this is what it would sound like.”） And it's too wise. Gordon can't help dishing out the metaphysics:

I've often thought that the problem of foolishness is more metaphysically vexing than the problem of evil. Evil is a hard dark point, or a hypnotizing vortex; it's humbling; you can learn something from it, if it doesn't destroy you. … But foolishness is an unworthy adversary; it just smothers you in its wet thickness.

Most of all, what carries this work above fantasy—“utopian,” as Gordon calls it, or “an entertainment,” as Mary Cantwell described it in Vogue, or even something megalomaniacal and Napoleonic, as the crusty, cranky critic said in the daily New York Times—is the truth of work, the knowledge of art. That's what keeps Gordon's mouthy, funny, prickly Monica always on earth.