[In the following review, Martin offers favorable assessment of Good Boys and Dead Girls.]

Novelists who write essays on politics, education, religion, art and literature participate in a venerable tradition. In the 19th century, George Eliot, William Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain and others demonstrated their prowess as critics; in the 20th, Virginia Woolf, Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood, among others, have also made it clear that creative and critical skills can enrich each other.

With the publication of Good Boys and Dead Girls: And Other Essays, Mary Gordon shows us once again that there need not be a schism between the esthetic and the analytical. The author of four novels （Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side） and a collection of short stories （Temporary Shelter）, Ms. Gordon is at her best in these essays, as well as in her fiction, when writing about the impact of Irish Catholicism on art and life. No longer conventionally religious herself, Ms. Gordon admires those writers who take a moral position: she praises Edna O'Brien's “pervasive ironic morality,” Flannery O'Connor's “conscious” Catholicism and Mary McCarthy's willingness to draw a “firm line.”

In contrast to her fierce appreciation of the life-affirming work of the painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Cassat and Berthe Morisot, Ms. Gordon is outraged by Andy Warhol, whom she decries as nihilistic as well as untalented. Convinced that Warhol lived in a moral vacuum, Ms. Gordon is depressed by his love of mass culture and the popular image. While Ms. Gordon's high-church assessment of Warhol's work is questionable in the larger context of art history, her passionate response is provocative and bracing.

Although Ms. Gordon sometimes takes the high ground in these wide-ranging essays （many of which originally appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Antaeus and The New York Times Book Review）, she often tempers her judgments with humor as she offers acerbic reflections on the complexities of abortion, marriage, pregnancy and motherhood, family politics and class consciousness. Describing the range of responses to abortion, she writes: “After having an abortion, some women get dressed and go to Burger King and some want to die.” Similarly, her observations about her own religious childhood are funny yet poignant. She recalls putting thorns in her shoes “for penance,” pleading with the owner of the local gas station to take “the nude calendar off his wall,” begging the proprietor of a candy store to remove the sex magazines from his shelves. Her pious efforts failed: the thorns were so painful she sacrificed beatitude for comfort; the gas station owner exiled her from the premises; the candy store proprietor stopped giving ＼her］ free egg creams.”

Ms. Gordon marvels at the difference between her own upbringing and that of her children. For her, the Devil “was real. And he was feared.” Nevertheless, she tells her own young daughter that the Devil is “like the banshee or the Loch Ness monster.” Noting the leap from the sacred to the secular in one generation, Ms. Gordon explores the contrast between believing in “seven capital sins, three theological virtues and four moral ones, seven sacraments, seven gifts of the Holy Ghost” and in appreciating the esthetic form of the Mass and the literary power of liturgical language.

The first two sections of Ms. Gordon's book contain essays on literature and contemporary issues, but the third, “Parts of a Journal,” is more free in form. Here Ms. Gordon moves deftly, for example, from reflections on the female reproductive cycle to her interpretation of the Gospel of St. Mark, thereby creating her own hermeneutics. Reviewing her experience of pregnancy and motherhood, which she sees as inversely related to artistic accomplishment, she frets about the impact on her moral life of having children, describing “the membrane that my obsession with them creates between me and the outside world.” Yet Ms. Gordon does not hesitate to assert the sensory, even sensuous, pleasures of mothering: “A film of moisture covers my flesh and my son's. Both of us drift in and out of sleep. … I am ancient, repetitive. In a life devoted to originality, I adore the animal's predictability.”

Only the title essay, which is one of the few of these 28 pieces that have not been published previously, is disappointing. Arguing that American fiction and culture are too often based on the masculine “search for the unfettered self,” Ms. Gordon bemoans the association of “females with stasis and death; males with movement and life.” This bifurcation of active and passive spheres has been explored in greater literary complexity by feminist scholars in the past two decades. In addition, it lacks historical depth: what Ms. Gordon attributes to the American masculine imperative to escape “bruising authority” is in fact rooted in the more complex heritage of antinomianism—the conviction that subjective experience is as important as religious doctrine—that was the basis of the trial of Anne Hutchinson, the 17th-century Puritan who was tried as a heretic for holding Bible study sessions in her kitchen. Had Ms. Gordon more clearly understood the origins of the American insistence on autonomous selfhood and subjectivity （the “escape from fate,” as she phrases it）, she would no doubt have seen its relevance to her own development as a novelist and critic.

Despite this lapse, Ms. Gordon's book is both rewarding and challenging, for it chronicles a mind shaped and informed by religious experience, but not constrained by theological dogma. Through these essays, the reader understands that, like the work of the writers and painters she most admires, Mary Gordon's own writing is buttressed by a powerful moral vision.