In 1978, with the publication of her first novel Final Payments, Mary Gordon appeared on the literary scene, not as a promising apprentice but as an accomplished and mature writer deserving of the extraordinary amount of critical attention her work received. Prepublication remarks from such distinguished novelists as Mary McCarthy and Margaret Drabble brought the book to the immediate attention of several prominent critics, and when the book was published, the reviews indicated that the promise of the book was justified.

The author of this novel about a woman emerging from an intensely Catholic neighborhood in Queens, New York, after the death of her intensely Catholic father, comes from a background that is part Catholic, but also part Jewish and part midwestern. Her mother was a New York Catholic of Irish descent, but her father, who died when Gordon was eight, was a Jew from Ohio who converted to...