Final Payments is a work of casuistry concerned to examine the conflicting demands of morality, especially Catholic morality. Isabel Moore, the heroine, blunders about, discharging ruin and agonizing about whether she is behaving well. It would be reassuring to feel that Mary Gordon knew she had created a Pharisaic monster and would dissociate herself from sympathy with Isabel's lethal spiritual struggles. This is not made clear and I was left with the feeling that perhaps Isabel was intended by her creator to represent Heroic Virtue or something of the kind….

[This] book invites judgement by moral, even more than by purely literary, criteria. (p. 23)

The characters in this book are static, in the sense that at the core of their being lies not a psychology but a morality.

They are almost 'humours'. Thus, although they interact they cannot change or evolve. Liz, the hard-bitten, but softhearted, girl-friend will grunt wise-cracks to the end of time. Judgement day will discover Margaret still reeking sourly and muttering envious complaint masked as devout solicitude. Isabel herself is essentially the idea of moral dilemma who will bounce indefinitely from socket to socket of the Catholic pin-ball machine with her shiny steel surface unscarred by earthly experience. The fundamental impulse behind Final Payments, adequately implied by the title, is eschatalogical rather than fictional.

This is matched by a curious feature of the writing: the image without real content. The offending lady at the bus terminal who 'laughed like an animal' is credited with patches in her hair 'the colour of egg yolks', 'eyes … the colour of a chemical', 'a face the colour of egg whites' and so on. Ignoring the obsessive egg comparisons, which might well haunt a childless woman, these similes seem to express a refusal to collaborate with mere matter and, although certain excellent passages reveal Mary Gordon's talent for description, generally speaking the novel is set in a kind of featureless limbo.

Readers will rightly suspect by now that I didn't much enjoy this book. It seemed to me to be theology posing as fiction, a hybrid form which compounds the tedium of the former with the imprecision of the latter to the advantage of neither. Nevertheless, a case, and even a strong one, can be made for the defence. Mary Gordon is a natural writer who has enough authority over language, imaginative strength and eye for character to furnish a splendid novel. The vignettes in which Isabel explores a variety of bewildered old folk lodged with sometimes negligent, sometimes caring hosts, struck me as excellent. There is no doubt that Final Payments is an auspicious debut … and little doubt that its author will speak to us again. My own hope is that next time her voice will be less that of the casuist than of the novelist. (p. 24)