Mary Gordon's much-praised Final Payments may be the best American feminist novel yet, though its thematic emphases are skillfully concealed beneath its wry surface picturing of an Irish Catholic girl who "gives up her life" for her invalid father, nervously edges back into reality after his death, then chooses renunciation again (for "having put myself at the center of the universe")—in a drastic penitential act that is simply unbelievable in pure narrative terms (though it does deftly dramatize women's reluctance to claim all they're entitled to).

The overall shape of Gordon's story is itself an eloquent comment on the nature of woman's fate. The simple declarative style, with its emotion-charged repetitions, generates great intensity. And, not least of all, Gordon's spectacular verbal skill allows her heroine to express complex emotional and intellectual attitudes with great precision. Final Payments is, owing to the tactical error I have mentioned...