[In the following review, Mantel offers tempered assessment of Spending.]

Sex, art, money: that's what it's all about. So we learn in the neatly chiseled opening sentences of Mary Gordon's new novel. Add in death and we would have a ferocious quaternity to frame the action. But in Monica Szabo's world, death is the gracious suspension of breath that she finds in the works of the great masters of religious art. It is a death that is curiously lifelike, but she does not notice this until one or two life crises have come and gone.

Monica is a painter: middle-aged, well preserved, amicably divorced. She has twin children, age 20, both of them bright and capable girls, and she has a small but growing reputation. She is ambitious. No post-modern jokiness will do for her. She believes in her work, and she is scrupulous in placing a divide between herself and those with a thinner talent. They are not artists; let them keep galleries. The notion of the “Sunday painter” makes her squirm.

Day to day, Monica's need is for space and time. She has struggled hard to find “someplace to live that didn't look like Lee Harvey Oswald was brought up there.” Teaching eats into her working week, her New York studio is poorly lighted, her summer rental in Provincetown is cramped. What sort of a painter would she be if these irritations were removed? Along comes a man, like a genie out of a bottle, and offers to let her find out.

B, as she calls him, is unattached, sexually dynamic. He would like to be an artist, but isn't, and so he offers to be her muse. Unlike the traditional female muse, he is very rich. He is a futures trader. Monica doesn't know what this is and remains incurious until the late stages of the book （“He might have been an alchemist or a blacksmith for all the understanding I had of what he did”）. On the night of their first meeting, she and B begin a passionate affair. He offers her enough money to quit teaching, to travel, to rent a new studio. Caviar and silk camisoles shall be hers, and first-class flights to Italy, and nights and mornings of orgasmic bliss.

Misgivings set in. Is she a whore? Call yourself a sex worker, suggests the less sympathetic of her daughters. Money is something Monica hates to deal with, even the thought of it makes her queasy. She has always put her work first. What is the relationship between desire and inspiration? Which impulse will win—early morning sex or the need to be out of bed and in the studio when the light is at its best?

The reader's misgivings are perhaps more profound that Monica's. If you are a painter, a writer or a musician, it may be that your struggle with daily life lends an importance and dignity to your work that it would lack if the struggle suddenly ended. When the external challenges are removed, you have to confront the inner ones. Is your work important? Perhaps only the effort to do it makes it seem so. What happens when the artist gets “the clean slate,” “the clear field”? The leisure to examine one's talent might result in the alarming conclusion that it is not so great after all. These difficulties are suggested, but Monica is not paralyzed by them. Instead, a major project overtakes her, the project that will be the making of her.

In “Sexual Personae,” Camille Paglia argues that Michelangelo's “Dying Slave” looks not so much moribund as post-orgasmic. It is, she says, a “pagan crucifixion.” Monica takes a further step, focusing on the figure of Christ deposed, Christ in that difficult interval between cross and burial. She studies the paintings of the great artists and notices the coy crossed ankles, the voluptuous gleam of light on ribs elegantly speared. She discerns an exhaustion that does not correspond to death so much as to post-coital languor. （If she had half an eye, she would ask herself whether it is in Pietà figures that Christ is most sexualized; but this would not fit the plot.） Monica begins a series of paintings called “Spent Men,” which will reinterpret masterpieces of Renaissance art. She decides to use her lover as a life model for the exhausted God.

For this piece of daring—personal and artistic—she is rewarded with a sell-out show. Gordon is articulate about Monica's passion for “painting vision,” about her efforts to find a place to stand and look at a tradition that is European and male. Monica succeeds in finding an idiom where her work will “include the relation of the past—art and faith—to the present,” incorporating “the working female artist” who is “touched by the past but not shaped by it entirely. A light, indelible impression. Not a crushing hoof.”

And Gordon herself, in writing distinguished by its freshness and grace, demonstrates a devoted attention to the visual. “All I could think about,” Monica confesses at one point, “was green skies, skies with small, dingy, disengaged smoky clouds in them, like smudges underneath an eyelid. Mascara the morning after.”

The difficulty comes when Monica loses the thread of her argument with herself. She has already noted that painting Christ is not like, for instance, painting Achilles. Her Roman Catholic girlhood tells her that its resonances are different. Why, then, is she surprised when her show is picketed by a Catholic pressure group? The reader is not.

Indeed, the book seems to lose its ambition to surprise. Conflicts—internal and external—arise only to be waited away. The threat from the Catholic protesters simply dissolves, and though Monica has to go on talk shows and otherwise debase herself, her reputation is only enhanced. B loses his money, but gets some more, and it doesn't matter anyway because by then Monica is rich in her own right and has decided she likes him and will help him out.

Monica's spiky personality entertains the reader, and Gordon uncovers in her layers and layers of ambivalence. But Monica's guilts as woman, as mother, are the routine ones, and don't go deep. Gordon's snappy wit keeps the reader interested （“Try and Relax is a three-word oxymoron”）, yet the book is slowed to a crawl by its heroine's need for introspection. After the one-third mark, we should know Monica for ourselves, but every shift in her psyche is monitored, made explicit. The reader is given little credit for having paid attention.

Mary Gordon is an honest and perceptive writer. She shows these virtues in her dealings with the reader, but then she turns them into vices. She seems unwilling to take a short route to any conclusion that involves human beings and the way they behave. This endows her narrative with calmness, realism and grace. It takes away, though, the conflict and drive that should power it.

Monica feels bad, then good, then bad again. The cycle will stop just when the author chooses. We are being manipulated, after all. There are times, early in the story, when Monica is refreshingly unlikable, and Gordon is good at describing how the self-abnegating nature of creative art can look to family and lovers like plain old selfishness. But she admires her heroine too much.

Despite the variety of prettily written sex scenes, the novel's end is an anti-climax. It is as if, for example, in a Faustian pact story, the devil took the bond sealed in blood and lost it through a hole in his pocket. There is no interest, and ultimately no life, in a narrator who—as artist, feminist, lover—is born to win. Gordon has subtitled her book “A Utopian Divertimento.” The point is taken; this is not real life, this is not how real life proceeds, this is a fairy tale. But we end with lip-smacking naturalism over pubic hair and pasta. An early indication of irony does not protect the novel from its final coziness.