Books in Brief: Final Payments

Final Payments, by Mary Gordon (Random House, 298 pp., $8.95; Ballantine paperback, $2.50). There are many reasons to like this novel—its disciplined, intelligent prose, its strong characterizations of women, its shrewd insights into Catholicism. But the main reason to like it is simply for its unmodern idea. Mary Gordon considers here as a major theme the notion of an individual’s responsibility to others, and she does it without writing a Sunday sermonette, or a bleeding treatise worthy of Beatrice Webb. Isabel Moore is thirty years old. For the last 11 years she has been caring for her father, a helpless invalid cut off from any sort of active life by a stroke. Now—finally—he has died, and Isabel must invent a new life, though of course she can never completely escape the past. Miss Gordon understands the ambiguities of caring, of filial love. She knows the motives are often selfish, or worse. Isabel, a saint to all in her Catholic community, is troubled by that very sainthood. Miss Gordon writes beautifully. There are sketches of old people in this book—as Isabel accepts a job as a government social worker— which should be read two and three times for their affection and depth. Alas, Miss Gordon’s male characters have none of this warmth. Isabel’s first lover is a cad, with lust on the brain, while the second has all the emotional complexity of cold chicken broth. Even Isabel’s father, who is at least given some emotional and intellectual substance, is too authoritarian, too temperamentally absolutist, to be lovable. But this is Mary Gordon’s first novel; and it is an impressive debut.