[In the following review, Kakutani offers positive evaluation of Men and Angels.]

For Mary Gordon's heroines, the choice between perfection of the life or of the work has always held center stage. Torn between the hope of “ordinary human happiness” and the pure, crystalline demands of an absolute vocation, between a need to fulfill personal imperatives and a need to submerge themselves in some kind of “clear, consuming work,” they've frequently ended up in an emotional and spiritual limbo. Both Isabel in Final Payments and Felicitas in The Company of Women were raised on the romance of religion, on the idea of selfless devotion to a cause, and though both defected from the Church, they would later experience domestic life in the world of men and children as a come-down from the loftiness of their earlier ideals.

In Men and Angels, her fierce, shining new novel, Miss Gordon broadens her concept of vocation to include art, as well as religion—thereby moving beyond the insular, Catholic universe of her earlier fiction—and she also sets forth a new, more generous and humane vision of temporal life. Whereas Felicitas in The Company of Women bluntly refused the promises of romantic and sexual love （“it is for shelter that we marry and make love,” she declared near the end of the book）, Anne, the heroine of Men and Angels, embraces, however tentatively, the possibilities of “that other life, beautiful and heavy-scented as a dark fruit that grew up in shadow, the life of the family.”

In doing so, Anne forgoes the consolations offered by the pristine, ordered realms of Art and Religion, and instead acknowledges all the messy entanglements and conditional values of humdrum daily life. Through painful experience, she comes to accept the fact that the heart cannot be moved at will, that it is subject to the vagaries of fate: and she realizes, too, that even the most potent love—between a parent and a child, between a man and a woman—is horribly limited. She can neither protect her children from the perils of everyday life—the hole in the icy pond, the slight suffered at school, the intractable fact of death—nor save them from unhappiness and misfortune.

When we first meet her, Anne has what seems to be a comfortable, comforting life, “ornamented with good fortune, like a spray of diamonds on the dark hair of a woman.” At 38, she's happily married to Michael Foster, a handsome professor at Selby College; she has two wonderful kids, “Darling Peter, Darling Sarah,” and a good job as an assistant director at the college art gallery. In addition, she's working on a monograph about an American Impressionist painter named Caroline Watson—the arc of whose life will come to counterpoint her own.

Writing in dense, lyrical prose that is as richly pictorial in its use of metaphor as Caroline's paintings, Miss Gordon conjures up Anne's world with extraordinary precision. Like Virginia Woolf, she has a gift for tracking the subtle ebb and flow of emotions, the insubstantial moon tide of feelings and moods; and she uses this gift to delineate Anne's inner life and to give the reader a sense of the social and moral rhythms at work in a small college town.

Anne worries, from time to time, that her life in Selby is too placid, that she has ignored her generation's feminist dictates by being mainly a wife and a mother, and her wish for change is soon fulfilled. When Michael is offered a fellowship abroad, she elects to stay behind with the children—in order to have time to complete her study of Caroline Watson. “She had done one courageous thing, had lived without him, had stayed at home to live a separate life while he went away,” writes Miss Gordon. “Why had she imagined that nothing would be risked and nothing lost in the arrangement? It is what her generation always did, expected everything and was always shocked, like children, when something had to be given up.”

Indeed Anne begins to see that all she had once taken for granted is subject to the terrifying flux of modern life. Caroline's story—she abandoned her 2-year-old son to pursue her career, traded a home and family for artistic achievement and a succession of hotel rooms—makes her wonder whether Art and Family are mutually exclusive notions. Her separation from Michael, coupled with the unexpected attraction she feels for another man, throws into question all her carefully packaged assumptions about marriage and fidelity. And the arrival of a pasty-faced au pair girl, named Laura, thoroughly disrupts the tranquility of her home.

There's something vaguely voyeuristic about Laura—she always seems to be eavesdropping, insinuating herself where she's not wanted. And thanks to Miss Gordon's use of shifting points of view, the reader also learns that she's a religious zealot, whose loneliness has twisted the teachings of the Bible into a strange, self-serving doctrine. Laura believes that she is one of God's chosen, that she's been sent to “save” Anne and her children by teaching them “that human love meant nothing,” that “it was only the Love of God that could protect and lead and cover.” In this sense, Laura seems like an extreme version of Father Cyprian in The Company of Woman, who preaches a doctrine of “hate the world and love God”—in her case, though, adherence to an absolute doctrine leads not to idealism but to simple madness.

One of the problems with Laura is that Miss Gordon uses her as a melodramatic device to keep the plot of Men and Angels ticking along—the reader can see the ending coming, a mile off—and to serve this end, she's frequently turned into a caricature of religious fanaticism. Readers may be distracted by other aspects of Men and Angels as well. Miss Gordon's insistence on giving a feminist reading to everything from sex appeal to artistic achievement （Nobody cares, complains one character, “if Monet was a bad father”） becomes tiresome at times; and as in her previous books, her male characters remain mere shadows of her woman. These, however, are fairly minor quibbles with what is essentially a beautifully written and highly ambitious novel—a novel that marks a new turn in Miss Gordon's brilliant career.