Final Payments is a well-made, realistic novel of refined sensibility and moral scruple, informed by the values of orthodox Christianity—qualities one does not expect from the debut of a young American writer these days…. Anything more different from the school of Jong could hardly be imagined; but there is a perceptible affinity between Final Payments and, say, [Margaret Drabble's] The Needle's Eye. In both writers the primary source of interest and concern is the effort of an ironic and fastidious female sensibility to be good….

Isabel Moore is a subtle, articulate, self-conscious narrator. She is well aware of the twists and turns of her own psyche—that she may have arranged to be caught in flagrante delicto to punish her father for taking her virtue for granted, and then punished herself by sacrificing her youth to his illness…. Indeed, the long illness of her father has been for her a kind of time-warp, from which she emerges, more frightened than exhilarated, to face the fact that she can make for herself any life she chooses….

[The] novel, so firmly and freshly written at the outset, threatens to turn soft at the core, like a sleepy pear. The main trouble is the character of Hugh [Isabel's married lover], and it may be some measure of the author's inability to make anything of him that the heroine is peculiarly attracted by his back, so that he spends much of the novel with his face inscrutably averted from us.

Ms Gordon tries hard to compensate for this thinness of characterization by passages of discreetly erotic lyricism and anguished introspection by the heroine which only push the novel dangerously in the direction of superior women's magazine fiction. But it recovers its poise and power splendidly in the last eighty pages…. It says much for the power of Ms Gordon's writing that the reader feels a genuine sense of dismay at the spectacle of the heroine's physical and mental decline [after she renounces her lover and again reenters the Catholic ghetto of her youth], and a genuine sense of relief when she finally allows herself to be rescued from it.

In one sense Final Payments is a study in the power of traditional Catholicism over those who were indoctrinated in it at an impressionable age. The heroine's utter subservience to her father is obviously a microcosm of the power structure of the authoritarian, paternalistic pre-Conciliar Church; and her renunciation of her lover a desperate attempt to recover the assurance of personal salvation that she enjoyed as a result of her self-mortifying service. In the end the heroine breaks the suffocating grip of the Catholic ghetto, and opts for a more open and humanistic ethic. Yet the novel is steeped in nostalgia for, as well as nausea at, that kind of Catholicism, and the undoubted distinction of its writing owes much to the high-cultural equivalent of the Catholic ghetto—the "Catholic novel" of Greene, Mauriac, Bernanos, Bloy, with its characteristic fondness for aphorisms that are subversive of liberal, materialistic assumptions. "I was angry at myself", says the heroine at one point, "for making the equation, my father's equation, the Church's equation, between suffering and value", but the equation seems stronger than her anger, and ultimately impervious to it….

I have emphasized the Catholic theme because it interests me particularly, but Final Payments is a rich, thoughtful, stylishly-written novel that should have a more than parochial appeal. The progress of its author will be worth watching.