[In the following review, Brown offers favorable assessment of Men and Angels.]

In one of the Irish writer Mary Lavin's stories, a woman stands beside her dying husband's bed and hears bird-song for the first time in years, “so loud ＼had been］ the noise of their love in her ears.” This moment has always seemed the quintessential expression of the triumph and danger of a fulfilling love, conjugal or parental: even the healthiest of loves can be consuming, limiting, threatening to the world and to the self, which is implacably single. And yet—the question hangs beside its unambiguous but not uncomplicated answer—what is the self without profound engagement with others?

Mary Gordon's third novel, Men and Angels, is a fine amplification of Lavin's paradox. Gracefully written, with a sustained fierceness new to her work, it is complex in its vision of family and motherhood, and pained, finally, at the terms we must make, all of us （for if we are not all parents, we were all once children）, with a universe that apportions love and its rewards unjustly.

Anne Foster, possessor of a Harvard Ph.D. in art history and of a household that contains her much loved husband, Michael, and a young son and daughter, is a woman haunted only by the fear that she has too much, has been too lucky, and therefore that she could at any moment lose it all. In this, her 38th year, she is at work with great absorption writing the catalog for an exhibition of the somewhat neglected paintings of an American woman, Caroline Watson, who went to Paris in the 1880s and had the misfortune “to be a merely first-rate painter in an age of geniuses.”

Mary Gordon sends Anne's husband to France on an academic exchange, thus freeing her of the comfortable “noise” of her marriage to hear for the first time the birdcalls of many kinds of creatures. She concentrates on her work for its own sake, and so that “refreshed she could dive back down to the dense underworld, to her children.” She is befriended by Jane, Caroline Watson's formidable daughter-in-law, who, together with Caroline, seems to have thrived on the inadequacy of Caroline's pathetic son, dead early of a lack of love and confidence. Suspecting her perfect husband of a dalliance in France, Anne falls in something like love with a young electrician whose wife's chronic illness makes him vulnerable. （To say this, incidentally, gives nothing away: Gordon, like Marge Piercy and others—perhaps we could go back to Jane Austen—has a formulaic weakness for certain male characters who, even in the face of momentary surliness or unseemly working-class occupations, are graced with aesthetically and morally impeccable habits, princes in disguise.）

The most decisive step Anne takes during this year of ostensible freedom is to reluctantly hire a young woman named Laura, because no mother can accomplish work that demands concentration without someone to help with her children. Unlovely and unloved, Laura arrives out of the limbo of utter homelessness, trusting in the Jesus who commanded that one leave one's parents, taking “neither gold nor silver … nor two tunics nor a staff,” to serve, even to kill, for the Lord, to do anything necessary to advance righteousness in the world. She will, we know from the start, bring the whole house down, though not necessarily in the ways we （or Anne） might fear.

Men and Angels begins in Laura's consciousness, which is fixed, desperate, essentially mad. She has grown up the victim of one of many kinds of child abuse that fascinate Gordon—in this case, the monstrousness of a mother who does not love her and does not dissemble about it. The vengeful havoc Laura wreaks strips Anne and her children of the luck of their lifelong belovedness, of the carefully nurtured perfection of their life.

Men and Angels is lush with the details of family intimacy, unlike Gordon's first two novels. The life of Felicitas in The Company of Women was lived primarily among virgins and widows, under the beneficent reign of a priest who is impossible father and lover to them all. In Final Payments Isabel yields to the patriarchy of her bedridden father, his Irish-Catholic cronies, and their negligent contempt for women. Men and Angels, by contrast, portrays motherhood and wifehood relished in wonderfully seductive detail: “＼The children］ took turns measuring the cocoa, the sugar, the milk, the pinch of salt … There are my children, Anne said to herself, these are the ones I missed. She could smell their thin high sweat; they should have taken off their sweaters. But it was autumn and she understood their feelings: woolen clothes on such a day were a pleasure in themselves.”

At the same time she recognizes the costs of such commitment: “Marriage muffled, it protected, it made it much more difficult to be generous because you were always kept back a little from the lives of others, and so from feeling their need,” Anne reflects; and she finds that motherhood muffles further. “But now she was a woman with young children; she couldn't possibly do anything dangerous to them. The whole shape of her life must be constructed to make her children safe.” Curious not merely about the work but about the life of Caroline Watson, Anne thinks “yet one wanted to know, when the women had accomplished something. Whom did they love in relation to their bodies? Whom were they connected to by blood? … But it wasn't the fact of connection that was interesting; it was how they got around it.”

What binds all of Gordon's work together, whatever its differences, is her unique fascination with the idea of love and its derivatives, the lovable, the unlovable, the unloved, subcategories as ineluctable as election and damnation.

Most novelists, it goes without saying, entangle their characters in questions of love and the power it gives and withholds: its acquisition, its maintenance, its loss. But the capacity to love and be loved—abstract as a Platonic ideal, however graphic its realization as plot—is a fairly unique preoccupation these days. One thinks of Hawthorne's Tales, perhaps of the woman perfect but for the birthmark on her cheek; or the aftermath of such death-of-the-heart novels as Elizabeth Bowen's, or Antonia White's Frost in May, or Robb Forman Dew's recent The Time of Her Life, which makes the disillusion attendant on a child's loss of love a permanent incapacitating scar. But in those books events befall, they are not inevitable. People choose their fates; the end is not written in the beginning. I can't think of one of her contemporaries who shares quite the same psychological/aesthetic determinism as Mary Gordon, whose vision of a gated kingdom, of a fiery excluding sword raised against the charmless, seems to shimmer in her imagination constantly.

In Gordon's work, loving is not so much a process as it is a state, given like grace; a condition, like beauty, into which one is born. There is no appealing its presence or absence in one's life: it is absolute, untouchable even by the love of God, which “means nothing to a heart that is starved of human love.” That is Mary Gordon's catch-22: for those who are most in need of its light, like flowers in a dark place, no love can penetrate or suffice. They are like instruments whose receptors are damaged, who give out a single mechanical cry of pain and need that, perversely, repels salvation.

In The Company of Women, Muriel, who has “a styptic heart,” envies and resents Felicitas, the child of grace, even as she loves her. In Final Payments, Margaret, representing every ounce of salt and vinegar Gordon can conjure up, the life-denying constriction of nuns without bodies, fights for the soul of Isabel, who has just—barely—leaped free into the pleasures of the contemporary secular world. Finally, in Men and Angels, though the Catholic church is hardly mentioned （Laura represents her own distorted church, a religion of desperation and defensiveness）, the agon is still familiar. Anne is elect, as are her children. Laura sues for her love and, losing, guarantees only one thing: that, having laid waste the kingdom of the graced by taking away the certainty of safety and sewing guilt and self-doubt, she will never be forgotten.

The girl's abjectness is echoed many times over. Caroline Watson, the painter whose letters Anne reads with fascination, is a terrible mother. She is given the single-mindedness of the artist too preoccupied to notice that her child is waiting patiently at the door while she works. （In fact it is worse: she hears him but does not respond.） Yet it appears to be her son's innate lack of appeal and force, not merely her need to get a day's work done, that keeps her from loving him. Cause and effect are a bit vague—undoubtedly both are true—yet Caroline at her death shoulders the blame for blighting him. And we are shown, conversely, how the （rather too simple） love of the electrician, Ed, saves his small son from the vagaries of a deranged mother's attentions.

On the way to the novel's conclusion, in which nothing is resolved except that there is no democracy of the affections, and that the emotionally hungry, whom we shall always have with us, will forever endanger the feasts of the fortunate, Gordon draws a hundred small moments beautifully. Anne, at 38, weeps because her parents no longer rush to succor her when she needs them. She buys tulip bulbs in too many colors because she “hadn't the courage for a unified field; she couldn't live with leaving so much out.” Her six-year-old daughter is humiliated in a ballet performance, betrayed only by her youth and eagerness. Anne begins to comprehend the complexity of certain sexual charades, the “lively attentiveness that came only with sex” but might in fact mask other needs. The novel has its flaws—Laura frequently becomes as tedious in print as she is said to be in person, revealing herself to be the contrivance that holds together the skeleton of moral concerns beneath the book's more poignant flesh. The epilogue iterates too explicitly what we have seen, casting a skein of sentimentality over the rest that it doesn't deserve.

But Men and Angels is a beautifully written, passionate inquiry into many kinds of vulnerability and power, and an acknowledgment of the pain of trying to balance instinctual love with a more encompassing compassion. If compassion is inadequate, so be it, Mary Gordon says through Anne: “Perhaps she was an adult now … Children's terror, children's sorrow, was all based on disappointment; adults took their grief from certainty and loss.” Such maturity becomes both character and author. This is Mary Gordon's finest book.