[In the following review, Bell offers positive evaluation of Spending.]

Mary Gordon's new novel is immensely engaging fun, a delightful romp by an author distinguished for narratives of rigorous self-denial, harrowing disillusionment, and painful self-discovery. If anyone deserves a holiday from conscience and an interlude with the pleasure principle, it's the writer of Final Payments, The Company of Women, and the recent memoir, The Shadow Man. As its subtitle suggests, Spending locates us in the land of make-believe, what if, and once-upon-a-time.

Gordon's premise is delicious: what if a fifty-year-old painter, divorced mother of twin girls, were offered patronage, and much more, all her heart desires, by a wealthy, sexy, adoring benefactor? Thus “B” presents himself, irresistibly, to the dedicated, talented Monica Szabo, our narrator and heroine. Monica knows very clearly what she wants and rather less clearly what she is, an incurable narcissist. Floating into intimacy with B, she thinks, “You can't possibly lose. He's watching you and you're watching yourself. And you know there's nothing you can do that he won't like. Your body weighs nothing. It would be quite easy to fly up, and float away. He would watch you, flying up, floating away, not at all surprised because the whole time he'd thought you were miraculous.” Spending is “The Unbelievable Lightness of Being.”

Gordon magically releases Monica from the restrictions of reality and cleverly reverses conventional patterns. Instead of being the objectified object of the male gaze, Monica stars in her own show. She is the maker, he is the model. What she creates is, like Monica herself, outrageous and irresistible, a series of postcoital variations on classic versions of Christ's passion （her theory being that the Christs of the old masters represented le petit mort）. Hence the title of her series, “Spent Men,” and the punning title of Gordon's novel.

B views Monica as miraculous. “I think you're a very, very good painter. I think one day you might be great.” “When you were younger did you think you looked like Hedy Lamarr?” When she momentarily worries that she could afford to lose ten pounds, doting B responds, “My God, you don't know much, for all you think you know. Don't you know the incredible power of what you've got there? Of the appeal of that endless responsiveness, and all its variety?” Even his gesture, “you don't know much,” yields to a paean of praise. To hear such stuff is a major motive to fall in love.

But B, love-struck, blind to cellulite and sag, not to mention his beloved's vanity and egocentricity, isn't the only character who feels Monica's “incredible power” and “appeal.” A former student presents Monica with a bouquet. Her sister Helena says to B, “We have something else in common. We both think my sister's a great painter.” Viewing Monica's new series, “Spent Men,” Monica's agent exclaims, “It's the most exciting work I've seen in a long time. I knew the idea was great but the execution is a triumph.” Monica has an insatiable need for praise, an urgent, incessant throb. She's got it half-right when she comments, “Maybe I have trouble accepting praise because my hunger for it is so boundless.” She's closer to the artist's dirty little secret when she admits what she'd really like to hear: “Every other living painter's work is shit. Yours, only yours, is gold.”

I found Monica a fully realized, compelling, intriguing figure. She describes the process of painting and works of art with vivid, passionate fervor. She's very nearly as persuasive depicting really good sex as she is describing Vermeer. And she is persistently smart and funny: “Nothing marks the death of desire like the moment when you find yourself thinking that the ex-wife had a point.” Another of Monica's endearing qualities is a tenderness for humankind, including males.

A vibrant novel, Spending has limited ambitions and effects, and it eventually runs out of steam. Monica's benefactor B is insubstantial and flagrantly fantastic: a rock of support, a geyser of praise, a faithful, worshipful lover, amusing but never threatening, a Wall Street futures trader who wittily quotes T. S. Eliot, and who is ready, willing, and able to drop everything and serve Monica's purposes. Financing her project and modeling her subjects, he is her sugar daddy, spending lover, and savior. When his herniated disk requires Monica's ministration and some erotic accommodation, B is only temporarily grumpy and the problem just disappears. If only! So full of loving-kindness and devoted patience is B that he is an apt model of Christ.

Monica seems too abundantly endowed, the recipient of excessive authorial affection and regard, or perhaps an idealized, privileged surrogate for the author. （She's a wonderful synthesis of Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf's To the Lighthouse）. Monica is not only romantically and artistically enabled but blissfully freed from the exigencies of reality. Swimming naked, Monica thinks, “Movement is utterly easy; you're working against nothing, what you're in wants you to move in it, with it, it offers no resistance, only help.” Encountering no resistance enables floating and fantasy but limits fiction and life. Without more intractability—vulnerabilities, inconsistency, orneriness—there's inadequate conflict between what Yeats terms “the perfection of the life or of the work.” Spending romanticizes artistic experience without studying the costs of artistic commitment. Monica's adventures are amusing and entertaining but not richly dramatic. Still, if you're looking for an artful indulgence of appetite, and a joyous spring fling, Spending is your ticket. Soon, I predict, to be a major motion picture.