Twentieth Century Sin

MARY GORDON'S first novel Final Payments attempts to show the effect of the denial of pleasure. However, she neglects to clearly explain her notion of either pleasure or self-discipline. Only her direct and meticulous prose makes her heroine's actions plausible.

The book opens after Isabel, the heroine, has spent thirty years of her life in a small Irish Catholic community near Manhattan. We see the orthodox funeral of her invalid father, to whom the devoted her past eleven years as her mind records it:

I stood behind Father Mulcahy and concentrated on the way his pink skull showed through his white hair... I stood near my father's grave, my black heels cutting holes in the grass. I kissed and was kissed; I answered people's expressions of grief with coos and cluckings, animal noises, which seemed at the time the only appropriate response. They had buried my father; I would never see him again. That I continued to breathe air surprised me. Walking past the statues of St. Michael and St. Gabriel, the archangels, I felt light...

Right from the start, Isabel admits the "murderous" influence of her father as readily as she acknowledges the importance of her upbringing in an oppressive Catholic subculture. In the course of Final Payments, Isabel, always tempted by sweets, lipstick, and high heels, reacts ambivalently to both influences. She is simultaneously sarcastic and sympathetic, resentful and grateful.

For my father the refusal of anyone in the twentieth century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful. Culpable ignorance, he called it. He loved the sense of his own orthodoxy, of holding out for the purest and the finest and the most refined sense of truth against the slick hucksters who promised happiness on earth and the supremacy of human reason.

Isabel is self-aware enough to draw parallels between her father's ideal and her own anachronistic choice to become a "saint" by sacrificing her youth to the care of a cripple. She questions the purity of her motives--makes her saintliness appear sinful and her vices sacremental. In retrospect she sees her decision to lose her virginity, for instance, as nothing but an attempt to shock her father into attention. Incestuous lovehate fro him made her sleep with his (only) disciple; perhaps she even intended to trigger her father's heart attack a few months later.

As the bottom of the idea of sin in Final Payments, then, lies the desire for complete control over life, for the purity and self-discipline that bring absolute certainty. There is something unique about a modern heroine who can take seriously the conflict between a religious yearning for clarity and the temptation of transient physical pleasures. Unfortunately, when Isabel tries "shaping" her life in the outside world, both she and the book seem to get lost in the muddle.

Her new job, interviewing those paid to care for the elderly, introduces her to many new people. But in an already cluttered, lengthy novel, this endless procession of new characters does little more than add confusion and tedium. Even Isabel's closest friends--Eleanor, a flighty sensualist, and Liz, a strong-willed lesbian--are not terribly interesting until they are forced to confront each other.

For a novel in which the heroine is supposed to be liberating herself, Final Payments is surprisingly sexist. Having never freed herself from the outdated dreams of her solitary years, Isabel flings herself at almost any man. Her father always was the "strong man" for her:

I cannot dismiss his faith, no one could, for it had been fiercely stripped of any pietism or sentimentality. Even my father kneeling with a rosary in his hands was not a pious sight. His faith had the appeal of war, and the horror. It was a force: manly, gladiatorial. No woman could have approached anything like it, as a woman's inevitably have to. He and God were fellow soldiers. Because he knew what he wanted, he felt entitled to do anything, and was capable of it.

Such a confession seems relatively powerful compared with the tedious sex symbolism attached to Liz's husband, with whom Isabel "commits adultery." With the trashy, soft-core pornographic cliches, this episode strikes one as hilariously funny, regardless of the author's intentions.

...and how kind it was of him, with his hand on my knee, stroking the silk of my stockings, and how charming the color of the hair on his hands, golden and shining, the color of beer. "I'm going to take you to see the sunset on the river," he was saying, with his tongue in my ear..

Isabel's final true love is as flat a character as can be. He turns out to be precisely that "slick hustler" who explains her life to her and tries to lead her from extreme orgies of self-abnegation to the moderate pleasures of middle-class womanhood.

It is a shame that Gordon lapses into such a sloppy narrative after the powerful beginning of Final Payments. Despite her disappointing story line and characters, the author's language is straightforward and immediate. In providing minute descriptions of her characters' physical environment, Mary Gordon's prose echoes that of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

Especially in the middle of the novel, Gordon's prose--saturated with adjectives; empty, if not revolting characters; and lurid sexual details--reads like something out of Mademoiselle or Ladies' Home Journal (in both she has published short stories). but when Margaret, Isabel's old housekeeper, reappears towards the end, the writing tightens up again. Margaret practically embodies that stubborn, un-American subculture, which the author seems to identify with Catholicism. Even if Final Payments lacks a clear message and Mary Gordon's language often crumples under the weight of her cliches, at least one gets the sense of a writer searching for her own voice.