[In the following review, Fitzgerald offers praise for The Company of Women.]

St. Cyprian was a third-century bishop of Carthage, and an outspoken opponent of Pope Stephen's liberality toward lapsed members of the young church. He was martyred, and personally so revered that he was canonized, and his name has for centuries appeared among those of the early fathers in the Canon of the Mass. Some of his overly rigid views and writings were, however, rejected and officially Indexed as teaching error.

Whether or not by design, a modern Cyprian, who plays a central role in Mary Gordon's fine new book, is reminiscent of his ancient namesake. Father Cyprian—pure, elitist, tyrannical, but unquestionably dedicated to his priesthood—has seen his most cherished theological conceptions rejected, and priestly practices altered, by the post-conciliar church. Unable to accept aggiornamento, he can neither live at peace with his Paracletist fellow-monks, nor effectively function as a secular priest, as he attempts to do after leaving his order. The only followers, or friends, left to him are his disprized “goose-girls,” five working women of disparate backgrounds, bound together by their devotion to him, and by the sustaining friendship that has grown up among at least four of their number. The only human being Cyprian can really love is the promising daughter of one of these women, the only child among them. Felicitas is well aware of the strangeness of her upbringing in this circle, of which she is the spoiled cynosure and greatest hope. As a young child, she fully returns Father Cyprian's love for her, even as she comes with time to realize what he will do to her life and mind if she does not escape his overweening presence.

Two of the women of the company are spinsters and two are widows. The fifth is manifestly a victim of Cyprian's purism and high-minded arrogation of authority to himself. Married briefly to a dangerous lunatic, Mary Rose is first saved from harm by Cyprian's practical action of leading her husband to Bellevue and doctors who adjudge him to be hopelessly insane. The priest then decides, however, quite on his own, that she is bound to this hapless marriage because her husband “wasn't insane when （she） married him.” This without reference to expert medical opinion or higher canonical authority. So Mary Rose obediently spends the better part of her life alone and lonely, attended by the kindly old Jewish owner of the theater where she works, who patiently waits for her to be free so that they can marry.

The others, apart from impossible Muriel, whose only wish is to have Cyprian to herself to wait upon, are no less subservient to his thinking. Occasionally restive and resentful, they are nonetheless faithful to him as mentor and attentive to his personal needs. Neither he nor they seem to realize that he is as dependent upon them as they are upon him. Clare is a well-off career woman in New York, who has inherited from her father a high-fashion leather business which she conducts with taste and acumen. Cyprian's highest praise of her is that she “thinks like a man,” and he is of course incapable of understanding that this implies an affront both to herself and her friends. “Womanish” is to him a pejorative term. Elizabeth is a gentle, fearful, but humorous schoolteacher, deserted by her husband after the death of their child. Bookish and bemused, she finds in Charlotte, the rough-tongued mother of Felicitas, a personality who calms her fears and provides the common sense, reciprocal humor, and reassuring warmth she needs to stay them. Charlotte, “whose real genius lay in never longing for what did not seem accessible,” takes life as it comes, and deals with it effectively. Cyprian has offended her unforgivably （as, in one way or another, he has offended all these women） by the suggestion that he mourns the death of her husband far more than she. As she realizes, what he really mourns is her marriage to a friend of his, a former seminarian whom he has hoped to make his own disciple. Still, like the rest, she can not only forgive him, she would die for him.

“The salt of the earth,” Cyprian calls her. She knows that this means he thinks she is stupid. “He had to do that with people, have that one little sentence about everyone, as if he couldn't remember who was who without it. She was the salt of the earth and Elizabeth was one of God's doves and Clare had a mind like a man's and Mary Rose was a ray of sunlight and Muriel was an extraordinary soul: Something in Cyprian made him do that, as if he had to pin people down so he wouldn't lose track of anybody.

In other words, Cyprian fits everyone into a flat and linear schema of his own. Felicitas matters much more to him than the others, but he sees her with an equally flattening eye: she is to embody the realization of all his hopes. Brilliant, studious, malleable, she is to be formed by himself into an infallible Héloise, or a Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin, Doctor of the Church. He would make of her a denatured, desexed disciple, a mind perfected in his own image. But Felicitas, even at fourteen and still passionately devoted to him despite her growing rage, knows herself better, and his hopes scarcely resemble her own. She is able to appreciate and return the love her mother's other friends surround her with, but she knows that she can find no model for her own life in theirs. At nineteen, now fully defiant, she crashes through all plans to send her off to absorb further “Catholic” education and persuades her mother to let her go to Columbia University instead.

Here, by one of the awful accidents, or designs, of love, she encounters a very different sort of man, a fatally handsome, and fatuous, professor of modern political philosophy, Robert Cavendish. He has likewise been able to attract to himself a company of women, but far more slavish women, who live in the seraglio he has set up in the process of freeing them from the old—or any—order of existence. Pitiable, empty, without dignity or real hope of any kind, Iris and Sally live at armistice with each other, occupying his apartment with Sally's small son, Mao, whom the mother is careful to present as the product of a causal—free—encounter, lest she bore the professor with the knowledge of his parenthood. Conversation in this household is usually stoned, entirely predictable, and ineffably boring.

Father Cyprian has once terrified, and infuriated, the adolescent Felicitas, when she speaks of her pleasure in the beauty of the natural world, particularly in the fragrance of grasses, on a drive with him in the country one fine summer day. By way of punishment for this pantheistic failure of ‘spirituality,’ he stops with her at the run-down farm of an odious family he knows, where he introduces her violently to the smells which for him represent nature: handsful of cow dung, chicken dung, and pig dung, calling this last the most aromatic of all because, as he tells her, “pigs eat garbage, like the mind of modern man.” Sickened and rebellious, Felicitas vows to herself never to forgive him, and it is a long time before she does. He has set her up for Robert's apparent health and beauty.

In this new establishment, ‘nature’ is exalted in theory, but in terms curiously similar to Cyprian's at the farm. Among her new friends, everything is either “good shit” or “bad shit,” and “getting （one's） shit together” defines acceptable thinking or performance. And again Felicitas has it thrust in her face ad nauseam. Transfixed by this unlikely academic, and with straightforward passion, Felicitas joins his absurd menage as a timid and unloved lover, taken more out of perversity than real attraction or interest on the philosopher's part. There she awaits his summons to bed as it pleases him, when her turn comes. The final indignity he imposes upon her is the suggestion that she further free herself and increase her experience by extending her favors to someone else, anyone else, say nondescript Richard, who lives downstairs with his three dogs, Ho, Che, and Jesus （which, of the nature-lovers, only Felicitas has the wit and will to feed properly and train）. Less able to resist Professor Cavendish's guidance than Father Cyprian's, Felicitas obeys, only to find herself pregnant “by one of two men,” as she must tell her mother and, eventually, the daughter who is born to her after she finds herself constitutionally unable to go through with an abortion. She is saved from utter despair by the simple, practical kindness of her mother and her mother's friends, including Cyprian, “people who had rigorously worked to banish instinct from their lives,” but whose love for her, unjudgmental and resilient, makes it seem entirely natural to them to alter those lives in order to help her construct a new and sheltering one for herself and her child.

Even Cyprian rallies round with an offer to help build a simple house for them near the one he has built for himself on the site of his parents' old farm in upstate New York. Charlotte retires and moves there, too, and Elizabeth moves in to help. Clare pays for everything, cheerfully, and eventually begins the construction of her own house nearby. Poor paranoid Muriel, continuing to fume at the breach of her privilege of sole proximity to Father Cyprian, is no more able to love the child, Linda, than she has been able to love Felicitas or the others, but she does what she can, and she is not excluded.

Only Mary Rose leaves the company, to marry her faithful suitor, a week after she learns that her mad husband has finally died. But before she leaves she has “brought with her the one gift none of the other godmothers had brought to the christening,” conventional responses. From Mary Rose and Joe, Felicitas gets the idea that the presence of a baby in the house is a simple pleasure, and for the first time she sees the child as weaker than herself, and as beautiful. Seven years later, Felicitas does not even remember when her life began to change—which is to say, return—and she is no longer desperate. She will marry the village hardware merchant, Leo. She will marry for shelter, she suspects, and to give Linda a father and “an ordinary life.” She wants, too, to be more human, and to escape what she feels to be a growing cruelty of judgment in herself that she hopes will be assuaged by sexual love. She wants for her child a father who doesn't father her as if they were both bodiless, as Cyprian had fathered, driving her to extremes of revolt.

The novel, with the exception of the somehow contrived and unbelievable university scenes, is skillfully and richly narrated in its first two parts. The third part, however, is the finest of the book. It is composed of beautifully written and extremely moving meditations in the distinctive voices of each of these women, and of Father Cyprian, who must in effect now choose death or life, after a heart attack. From these we learn something of the composure each has reached as an unexpected outcome of the ordeal of Felicitas, and we learn that they are all, except hopeless Muriel, happier than they have ever been in their lives. As Charlotte reflects: “There they are, five old women waiting for an old man to die, living in the country with a young woman and a kid. When you put it that way, it sounds pretty goddamn flat. But you can always make your life sound wrong if you try to describe it in a hundred words or less.”

Cyprian, reflecting on himself, and although aware that he, too, is happier than ever before, nevertheless suffers from a sense of failure on all scores, particularly in his priesthood. He is able to see the pride and fastidiousness that have moved him from the outset of his vocation, and to see what a trial he has been to his superiors and fellow-priests. Above all, he thinks about the aging women from whom he has received and accepted so much, even as he despised them all. He realizes how much he has needed them all, and how generously they have responded. He is able to decide that he will pray for the eventual ordination of women. His is a quantum leap in understanding, informed by a new awareness of the inestimable value and sweetness of human love. “I had to learn ordinary happiness,” he thinks, “and from ordinary happiness the first real peace of my life, my life which I wanted full of splendor. I wanted to live in the unapproachable light, the light of the pure spirit. Now every morning is miraculous to me. I wake and see in the thin, early light the faces of my friends.”

There seems less reason than before for him to fear, as he does, that he has betrayed his vocation in favor of the “terrible ringed accident of human love.” Rather, he seems for the first time able to value what he has received, and to return it in kind, instead of forcing upon his friends that which in his vanity he supposed he could give them from his own borrowed splendor. Until he sees the lumen lumens he has always longed for, the “slant, imperfect sun” will suffice to reflect it. He is spared the knowledge of the damage he has done to Felicitas by his dualistic schooling. Nor is she aware of the change that has occurred in him. Ironically, now that he might correct and amplify his previous instruction, she can, or will, no longer talk to him about it. But Cyprian's “grand, impossible life,” or the idea of it, she knows she will always need at the center of her own. He has made his most important point.

In this novel, Mary Gordon has undertaken something considerably more difficult than the subject of Final Payments. Uneven in execution it is nevertheless, I think, an even more impressive work, larger in scope, more deeply perceptive, richer in mystery, than the first book. A bravo performance. Encore, encore.