Mary Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments (1978), about the embattled coming of age of an Irish Catholic woman, was both a best-seller and the object of an astonishingly enthusiastic critical response, in which Miss Gordon was compared to Jane Austen and her novel was called a contemporary version of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. Her second novel, The Company of Women (1981), also a best-seller, met with a slightly less rapturous but still highly respectful critical reception; Francine du Plessix Gray was typical in hailing Miss Gordon as her generation’s “preeminent novelist of Roman Catholic mores and manners.” After this novel Miss Gordon announced that she intended to expand her concerns, and indeed her third novel, Men and Angels,¹ is ostensibly not about Catholicism. Except, of course, that it is; only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Mary Gordon’s background has supplied her with some unique qualifications to write about present-day Catholicism. Her mother, whom she has described simply as “an Irish Catholic working-class girl,” was the daughter of Irish and Italian immigrants. Her father, David, a Harvard-educated Jew, had belonged in the 20’s to the colony of American expatriates in Paris, where he gradually grew disaffected with modern culture. His sympathy with what his daughter calls “the embarrassing side” in the Spanish Civil War led to his conversion to Catholicism, and a tendency to romanticize the Catholic working class led to his marrying Mary Gordon’s mother. While his wife worked as a legal secretary, he made several attempts to found a right-wing Catholic periodical while staying at home to care for their only child (no doubt preparing the ground for Mary’s later ardent feminism—she has remarked that for her, feminism comes nearest to Catholicism as an informing framework of values). He died when Mary was only seven, but had by then already begun to teach her Greek, philosophy, and French.

Perhaps partially because of the mixed colors of her personal history, Mary Gordon gradually came to resent her confinement in the Catholic “ghettoes” of Queens and Valley Stream, Long Island, where she attended parochial school through the 12th grade. A docile child—she wrote devout tracts entitled “What Is Prayer?”—she became a rebellious adolescent who once organized a bubble-gum-blowing demonstration to harass the “ignorant” nuns she had come to despise. Her bitter provincial exile ended with a scholarship to Barnard. There Miss Gordon began her advance beyond the pale into the mainstream of American life—which for her, it seems, is entirely, eternally, lyrically Protestant. (Her perception of the ethos formed by the two religions sometimes seems a caricature-in-reverse. For her, Catholics are morbid and intensely self-scrutinizing while Protestants are confident, masterful, disciplined, capable of “a deep unstated sympathy.”) It being the turbulent 60’s at Columbia, Miss Gordon found more effective ways to protest authority than by blowing bubble gum. She participated in student strikes and sit-ins, and thereby, presumably, gained the social consciousness that filters into some of her work as a liberating alternative to the burdensome demands of Catholic charity.

But Catholicism is not entirely a negative force for Miss Gordon. She has remarked on its profound idealism, and in her novels she depicts a species of Catholic manhood that is fiercely compelling. To her heroines, moreover, she accords a driving passion and qualities of clarity, insight, and penetration that at times can make the Protestants around them seem watery and complacent. Miss Gordon still calls herself a Catholic, or, as she puts it, “I have a real religious life in a framework which I think of as Catholic.” But she doubts the Pope would be pleased with her: her views on birth control, abortion, and the ordination of women are unorthodox, and she has observed that “sexy people” leave the Church. On the other hand, her writing evinces a decided scorn for much of the updated Church of post-Vatican II and a certain nostalgia for the consuming seriousness of traditional Catholicism.

In some ways, Mary Gordon’s own story, as well as the story she tells in her novels, is one of upward ethnic mobility. But it is a story with a twist: Catholicism, with its insistent ethic of self-renunciation, can make the achievement of worldly success seem not just difficult or forbidding, but positively evil. This tension between the mutually exclusive demands of the sacred and the profane gives Mary Gordon’s writing its all-absorbing, almost obsessive intensity, and may well account for the excitement her work has provoked. In a generation of casually pervasive materialism, her protagonists’ struggles to break free of the peremptory, otherworldly claims of the Church and to carve out a share of “ordinary human happiness” must seem both deliciously exotic and monumentally heroic. Without the defining element of religion, the resemblance of her novels to the genre known as “women’s fiction” (in which omnicompetent heroines battle through impossible odds toward inevitable triumph) would no doubt have been more readily discerned.

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This is not to suggest that Miss Gordon lacks technical skill; quite the contrary. She can be fabulously descriptive; her tightly packed sentences burst with metaphoric energy; her characters can be large, her situations affecting. Reviewers have praised her for all of this—and have as well cited her flaws, which include overwriting, a tendency to fall back on stereotypes, failure to sustain an overall narrative. But it is clear that they are ultimately impressed with something far greater than technical skill. With Miss Gordon’s novels, it seems, they enter the presence of something almost, well, holy. A “painful, powerful transforming book, the monster we have all been waiting for,” said the Christian Science Monitor of Final Payments, while the New York Times found The Company of Women to be a vision of “integrity,” “chastity,” “purity, ambition, and grandeur.” Miss Gordon’s concerns, asserted Harper’s, are nothing less than “eschatological”; according to Saturday Review, she writes about “instinct and reason, submission and authority, the holiness of the flesh, and the awesome power of love to diminish, enrich, and immortalize.” And when they are not agreeably dazzled in this manner, Mary Gordon’s critics praise her for freeing us from “the false lessons of the past,” for dethroning “the mythical nobility of suffering,” and for exposing the charity that is really disguised masochism, the morality that is only a cover for hypocrisy.

This, then, with a few emendations and detours, and the determined imposition of feminist ideology, is the substance of the Gordon oeuvre: a muscular prohibitive orthodoxy crusades against a sunny mainline permissiveness, while the heroine, who embodies the best of both worlds, is torn between the righteousness of being Catholic and the freedom of being Protestant.

This struggle appears in Miss Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments, in the form of a revisionist treatise on love and charity. Isabel Moore, Irish-Catholic born and bred, has made a sacrifice unusual for the self-seeking generation to which she belongs but (Miss Gordon implies) typical of the Catholic female with dreams of self-denial. When she was nineteen, her adored father, a widower, an ultra-conservative Catholic, and a professor of medieval literature at a small Catholic college in Queens, had discovered her in bed with his favorite student, and shortly thereafter suffered a stroke. Isabel has cared for him through eleven years of wretched invalidism, both hating and loving her self-imposed martyrdom. The novel opens at his funeral, when she realizes that she must “invent an existence for herself.”

Once freed of her burden, Isabel eagerly plunges into the indulgences of the flesh. She sells her house and acquires an I.U.D., then takes on a new job, a new apartment (outside of Catholic Queens), and a couple of lovers (both married, one to a best friend); thirty years of Irish Catholic repression have obviously failed to dim her capacity for the sensual and the sexual. But Isabel soon finds living for the pleasures of this world more than she can bear. The repellent, self-pitying wife of one of her lovers humiliates her and triggers off a terrible episode of guilt and self-condemnation. Isabel determines to return to a life of self-sacrifice. With the willed perversity of the saints who drank the water in which they washed the lepers’ feet, she undertakes the care of the aged and impoverished Margaret Casey, a onetime housekeeper for her father and herself.

Margaret is a selfish and sanctimonious woman whom Isabel has always despised but toward whom she still feels an intense obligation. She sets herself the task of learning to love this woman she hates in order to attain the pure, impersonal state of Christian charity. It is a mistake, concludes Isabel, to want to love uniquely and be loved uniquely; better to love “as God loved His creatures, impartially, impervious to their individual natures and thus incapable of being really hurt by them.” But soon it becomes obvious to her that such forced sacrifice is itself illegitimate. At novel’s end Isabel dispatches her debt to Margaret and resolves to seek a “reasonable life” of ordinary satisfactions.

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Mary Gordon once expressed surprise that a novel of “sacrifice and old age” should have been so warmly received as was Final Payments—as if the esoteric ethic of self-renunciation were not this author’s chief appeal. But “sacrifice and old age” are in any event only half the message of Final Payments. The other half is a treatise on how to overcome guilt, cut loose from life’s losers, and buckle down to enjoying “the cares of this world” as soon as possible. Thus, much of the book is devoted to Miss Gordon’s improvements on traditional morality. When Isabel commits adultery she suffers a sharp backlash of guilt, but the book reminds us that this “sin” breaks up a stagnant marriage and frees one of life’s winners from one of its congenital losers. (“I was never any match for her, with all her deprivations,” the defecting husband declares of his whining martyr of a wife.) In Isabel’s job as a social worker (investigating home care for the aged), she comes across an old woman ready to commit suicide because of her need for particular love rather than the “generalized charity” she receives; Isabel does not hesitate to help her end her life, once again with the novel’s quietly defiant endorsement.

It is here, in the dichotomy between the need for personal affection and the Catholic exhortation to universal love, that Miss Gordon repeatedly focuses her moral attention. But she has stacked the deck. Universal, unconditional love is for her largely the love of and for losers. People love God and seek to be loved in Him mostly because they are tired or defeated or because “their bodies . . . had not given them sufficient pleasure.” These losers not only lack the courage to risk human love but never had much to recommend them to begin with—no beauty, grace, intelligence, humor, or sensuality, especially no sensuality. (Other models of loser-spirituality include Isabel’s father, fanatical and often hateful, and Father Mulcahy, her pastor, loving and loyal but somewhat beside the point. The men of Isabel’s choice love “conditionally.”)

Personal human love is for the winners—for those with all the assets plus the guts to ask to be loved for themselves alone and “not for what we share with the rest of the human race.” But once you admit your need for such love, you are vulnerable; “there was nothing worth living for once you lost it.” Hence Isabel’s sympathy for the old woman’s desire to commit suicide. Life is “monstrous” in its “randomness” as to who gets the good stuff, and in its precariousness as to who gets to keep it, but there you have it; the winners accept the terms.

The problem is that Catholicism asks the contenders to care for the rejects. How to quiet this nagging demand with minimal energy and still stay on the fast track—that is the question that haunts Isabel, who recognizes, correctly, that the charity and sacrifice being demanded cannot be accomplished through a simple act of the will (she does not surmise that it can be achieved through grace). And so she rejects her parochial-school lessons—“Love is measured by sacrifice,” and “Charity suffereth long and is kind”—in favor of something much simpler:

Margaret’s life would be more bearable if she did not have to worry about money. And I had money, money from the sale of the house. It occurred to me, simply, that I could give up my money; I did not have to give up my life.

By signing over her entire bank account to Margaret, making her “final payment,” Isabel is freed from pointless self-sacrifice and can begin her own life anew: “It was all the money I had in the world. But I was free of Margaret now, and I felt weightless. . . . There was nothing left between us. Margaret could not touch me now.”

It seems awkward to have to remind such a self-reflective writer as Mary Gordon that in the very same chapter of I Corinthians from which she draws the title of her third book, Men and Angels, Paul gives a clear warning against precisely this kind of giving: “though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor . . . and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.” But Miss Gordon, who so arranges her moral landscape as to make any impulse toward transcendent love seem deluded, aims of course precisely to dismantle charity in its Christian sense. Indeed, even private philanthropy is not her idea of a model system for the necessary redistribution from winners to losers. Isabel’s first lover, a pointedly crude, callous, and selfish man, nevertheless “really does a lot of good” in his position as overseer of county welfare programs: more good, it is implied, than can ever be done by trivial acts of self-sacrifice. “Governments gave money and did not ask for love. Money was beautiful . . . you could change lives without giving up your own life.” Government is a “dealer in charity without the weights of love.”

In her expose of Christian charity, Mary Gordon thus inadvertently gives us a sudden compact insight into the much vaunted “compassion” of the Left. We may be seeing here just what is impelling so many Catholics to equate their religion with the welfare state: not so much compassion as guilt, and the desire to enjoy life’s banquet disencumbered of Lazarus at the gate.

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One reason Final Payments needs to be examined in detail is that it fixes the pattern of which Miss Gordon’s later novels are progressive variants. The Company of Women, set partly in the pre-Vatican II period, draws the same sort of (loaded) dichotomy between universal and particular love. A group of unattached women, living separately, are linked by the guidance of a powerful conservative priest, Father Cyprian, who has in one way or another helped them, given meaning to their lives, and made them into “something.” This little company places all its hopes for the future on a girl named Felicitas (after “the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness”), the daughter of one of their widowed members and the only child among them. But Felicitas gradually rejects the all-pervasive spirituality that Father Cyprian would impose upon her. She leaves her mother’s Brooklyn apartment for Columbia University, briefly undertakes a radical style of life, gets herself pregnant, and returns to the group to have her baby. At this point the women build themselves houses near the now-retired Cyprian. Felicitas eventually agrees to marry (another man), and little by little begins “to have an ordinary life.”

The novel makes conscious allusion to Jane Eyre, an allusion which Miss Gordon has underscored in interviews. Like Mr. Rochester, Cyprian must be symbolically castrated—Mary Gordon has warned us about her feminism—broken from his obsession with spirituality and made to accept his own need for human love. At the end of his life he is forced to admit that “the love of God, untouched by accident and preference and failure,” still eludes him. As for the particular love of the women who surround him, this is the only real love he has felt—a fact he admits somewhat grudgingly: “They have dragged me down to the middling terrain of their conception of the world, half blood instinct, half the impulse of the womb.” (Such ideas are among the elements that bring Miss Gordon closer to D.H. Lawrence than to the “female tradition” of Jane Austen and the Brontes she seems to believe she belongs to.) So much for putting your eggs in the basket of spirituality.

As for Felicitas, she continues the line, set by Isabel in Final Payments, of criticizing the ways of God to man: “I will not accept the blandishments of the religious life; I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness. God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there He’s a poor contender.” While the older women need a strict Catholicism to fill and order their otherwise diffuse and empty lives, Felicitas manages on what is revealed as a budding feminism. She turns away from sexual “liberation” when she sees how men exploit it for their own selfish pleasure. A graphic description of a mangled abortion, as well as a section telling how Felicitas at first hates her baby and learns to sympathize with abusive mothers, constitutes part of this novel’s contribution to feminist suasion. (In Final Payments it was a defense of lesbianism and a glorification of female friendship; in Men and Angels, it is an object lesson in how to combine family and career.)

But the feminism in The Company of Women goes far beyond the promotion of various items on the liberationist agenda to become the new moral imperative. The doomed, savagely devout priest is obviously meant in a way to stand for the old Church itself, which pointedly needs to be cut loose from male spiritual chauvinism—“macho clericalism,” as Miss Gordon has put it—humanized, feminized, and brought down to earth by (the company of) women. If it seems at first surprising that Miss Gordon is no supporter of the post-Vatican II changes in the Church, and indeed mocks many of their manifestations—priests in chinos, sappy new rites of penance, daisy-covered prayer cards, etc.—this is because her real hope for renewal derives from the mystical and salvific feminism evident in The Company of Women. It is the female principle that will save Catholicism from the death of orthodoxy—although how the replacement of one expansive orthodoxy by a second, much narrower one constitutes an improvement, she does not say.

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At any rate, traditional Catholicism having been effectively consigned to the ash heap of history in The Company of Women, in her latest novel, Men and Angels, the ideal of an ascendant religious sensibility is no longer embodied in a compelling man like Cyprian, but in a quintessential loser. Laura, a pathetic waif, bruisingly rejected by her family, seizes upon the idea of God’s love to assuage the miserable loneliness of her existence. She becomes a mother’s helper to Anne Foster, a Harvard Ph.D. in Art History and a winner who is not yet wholly secure about the fact. Anne has been happily making a home for her two children and her husband, a professor of French literature at a small northeastern college, when she is offered (at thirty-eight) a remarkable opportunity to prepare the catalogue for an exhibit of the works of Caroline Watson, an early 20th-century painter (a fictional composite of Cecilia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, and Suzanne Valadon), neglected in her own time but now being rediscovered thanks to the current interest in women. Taking the job requires that Anne stay home with her children while her husband goes off on a sabbatical to France.

Anne makes several attempts to be nice to Laura but really comes to despise her—for Laura, pathetic as she is, is also carefully presented as difficult and self-righteous. But Laura, falsely cheered by Anne’s outward signs of affection, is so devastated when Anne fires her for negligence that she commits suicide by slitting her wrists in the family bathtub. Later Anne, learning of Laura’s unhappy life, mourns her inability to have overcome her hatred of the girl and extend the love that might have saved her. But everyone assures her that such love is virtually impossible (they must have read Mary Gordon’s previous novels); no matter how much she suffered, Laura was inherently unlovable.

Anne, like Isabel before her, finally accepts the “monstrous” precariousness of human life—illustrated in various ways throughout the novel—without the consolations of transcendent love. As Laura may or may not be winging her way to the God who let her down, Anne walks bravely away from the gravesite into the beatitude of husband, children, home, and career.

She wept and wept. People were so weak, and life would raise its whip and bring it down again and again on the bare tender flesh of the most vulnerable. Love was what they needed, and most often it was not there. It was abundant, love, but it could not be called. It was won by chance; it was a monstrous game of luck.

Although Anne is presented as having no “religious life,” her tendency to self-scrutiny, her insecurity about her place in the world of achievement, and her fear that she might someday be punished for the “great good fortune” life has handed her put her fairly in the line of Miss Gordon’s Catholic heroines. In this novel the fanatical and anti-sensual religiosity has been filtered off into Laura, while the sunny Protestant version of “religious life” is represented by Jane, Caroline Watson’s beloved daughter-in-law, a beautiful, intelligent, and proud old woman who lives comfortably by the “senses” rather than by “morals.”

Actually, it turns out that Jane, in an access of guilt over the way she had treated her husband before his miserable, untimely death, had once sought and found forgiveness in God. But her faith is of that highly qualified variety of which Miss Gordon approves: God’s love (such as it is to begin with) will ever be “insufficient for the human heart,” it “means nothing to the heart that is starved of human love.” Thus the revisionist charity Miss Gordon advances as a gloss on the famous idealism from Paul that gives the book its title: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

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In her novels Mary Gordon goes over the same ground again and again—the precariousness and random unfairness of human existence, its value nonetheless, the right to enjoy it if one is a winner, the nagging problem of what to do with the losers. Miss Gordon’s work in some ways resembles those books and articles on “having it all” that are written for women, with their advice on cramming in as much as possible, keeping track of one’s needs, making sure they’re satisfied, the whole informed by a lurking fear that nothing will really suffice.

Thus in the end the real question is not whether human love will serve in the absence of the divine, for Miss Gordon’s books are not really about love at all; they are about the monumental self-centeredness released by the collapse of orthodoxy, the agitated emptiness that finds an expression in movements like feminism. It is a historical irony, no doubt inevitable, that this same agitation should be the presiding difficulty of the contemporary Church as well, with its restless movements and demands and its cries over the “monstrous” unfairness of being poor, of being female, of being deprived. Where there was once some ability to accept the simple grace of God’s love even in the face of inequalities, and to work in one’s own quiet way for His kingdom, now this entire dimension seems to have been lost, or perhaps destroyed. Yet it is hard to see how all the aimless revisionism, of the variety produced by the Church itself or proposed to it by the likes of Mary Gordon, is going to lead the way back to salvation. For Miss Gordon’s novels are at once the symptom and the artistic exemplification of the empty self-centeredness which happens to have become her subject.

¹ Random House, 241 pp., $16.95.