Final Payments is a well-made, realistic novel of refined sensibility and moral scruple, informed by the values of orthodox Christianity—qualities one does not expect from the debut of a young American writer these days…. Anything more different from the school of Jong could hardly be imagined; but there is a perceptible affinity between Final Payments and, say, [Margaret Drabble's] The Needle's Eye. In both writers the primary source of interest and concern is the effort of an ironic and fastidious female sensibility to be good….

Isabel Moore is a subtle, articulate, self-conscious narrator. She is well aware of the twists and turns of her own psyche—that she may have arranged to be caught in flagrante delicto to punish her father for taking her virtue for granted, and then punished herself by sacrificing her youth to his illness…. Indeed, the long illness of her father has been...