Mary Quite Contrary

The critics aren’t at all sure how to handle this one. Since her debut 20 years ago with “Final Payments,” Mary Gordon, patron saint of American Irish Catholic angst, has been hailed as one of this country’s finest writers. In return, she has dutifully produced three more lyrical novels--”The Company of Women,” “Men and Angels,” “The Other Side,” and countless essays and short stories, revelations all of the tyrannies of love and death, family and faith. Her last book, “The Shadow Man,” was an unflinching evisceration of many of the delicate themes and shadings of her fiction--a powerful recounting of her search for the truth about her long dead father. Nobody does pain and paradox like Mary Gordon.

But now Gordon, 48, has gone and written a book about money and sex and eating and art, a book about (gasp) pleasure. “Spending: A Utopian Divertimento” (Scribner) follows the life of painter Monica Szabo after she acquires a patron, a man known only as B., who for reasons of his own is determined to provide her with money, time and, oh yeah, sex, lots of sex, so she can do her best work. A combination bodice-buster, economic inquiry and Williams-Sonoma catalog, the novel is a hedonistic romp that also carefully considers the nature of money and power, of gratitude and obligation.

No funeral scenes, no rampaging matriarch, no sexually repressed prelates, just a woman in her 50s painting outrageous pictures, having an outrageous affair, living an outrageous life and not even having the decency to die in the end. Naturally, some critics are concerned. The New York Times in particular does not approve of Monica’s “remarkable capacity for self-forgiveness” or her “assumptions of superiority and moral rationalizations.” Reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt did not fault the writing, just the character, whom he found “bullying” and “megalomaniac.”

“I absolutely knew this would happen,” says Gordon of the rare criticism of her work. “They want you to sing ‘Melancholy Baby’ one more time when they’re just drunks in a bar, as far as I can tell. People are only comfortable with victim women. If a woman is claiming both work and pleasure, it’s intolerable.”

She isn’t angry when she says this, and that is fortunate. For though she is a small woman, soft-featured and dark in a neat pantsuit, she has those unveiled Irish eyes that are not to be trifled with. Gray eyes, large and luminous even in the daylight, that do not look away. They are eyes fully capable of pinning some poor soul to the wall with dark anger or chilly disapproval. Or lightening a nearby heart with warmth and laughter. Fearless eyes, without guile, that widen now in simple explanation.

“This is not 19th century realism I’m attempting,” she says. “I wanted to perform an experiment, I wanted to write comedy, a Shakespearean kind of comedy. It’s a good luck story. It’s about women, work and pleasure, about how you can have it all and wouldn’t it be fun?”

Gordon has swung by Los Angeles as part of her book tour, and the powers that be have put her in a hotel right across from the Beverly Center. Fitting, in light of the new novel’s meticulous attention to materialistic detail.

In fact, the main difference between “Spending” and her other novels is not the conspicuous consumption of sex, caviar and trips to Rome. The main difference is the author’s kindness toward her main character. Gordon’s characters, particularly her women characters, do not have an easy time of it. There is no indirect lighting in her novels, no softening of edges, no Vaselining of the camera’s lens. The characters are flawed; often broken, sometimes terminally; always exposed. Like the stereotypical Irish matriarch, Gordon the writer brooks no excuses for even minor transgressions.

Yet Monica gets away with murder, figuratively at least. She is not, Gordon admits, “submitted to that harsh Irish lens,” the one that cautions that life is a vale of tears to be endured as the admission price to the gates of heaven. Gordon allows Monica to have fun, even if it means acting like a brat sometimes; the book is written in the tones of an indulgent parent, which Gordon is. Verbally at least. She and her husband, Arthur Cash, have two children--Anna, 18, and David, 15--and when she talks about them, which is often, it is clear that those gray eyes, with all their intelligence and shrewdness, are above all a mother’s eyes. It is also clear that the fictional Monica did not exactly appear out of nowhere.

“She has such a mouth!” Gordon says proudly of Anna, “but that’s how I raised her. I had to be such a good girl; I wanted my daughter to have more possibility.”

Anna, whom her mother describes as “the last living Marxist,” found “Spending” a bit of a shock, not because of the blatant consumerism (“She is endlessly amused by the fact that I still consider myself a bohemian,” says Gordon), but because of the sex.

“When she read it, she sort of rolled her eyes and said, ‘When Virginia Woolf wanted to do something different, she wrote about a dog. My mother has to write about sex.’ ”

*

Monica, one could argue, is a gift from a mother who wants her daughter, her children, to have more possibility. Gordon, a feminist, has long railed against the images of women in fiction. “My daughter and I were watching ‘A Handful of Dust,’ and the female character is having a love affair, so in one scene you see her kid on a pony and I turn to my daughter and say, ‘This kid is dead by the second reel.’ And sure enough . . .” She ducks her head as she laughs. “The rule is, if a woman has an affair, somebody dies, either her or her child. The pages of literature are littered with the dismembered corpses of these women--Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. I wanted to undo this myth because I myself actually know of several women who have had great sex and lived.”

She ducks her head again and comes up with a grin that most definitely includes herself in one of the several--a happy twist of a grin that combines the glee and the guilt so that you can almost see, beyond the smooth upswept hair and sedate lines of scarf and jacket, the schoolgirl in her plaids and droopy socks hiding a smirk behind her hand as Father Fill-in-the-Blank drones on.

For the record, the lifelong New Yorker is still a practicing Catholic and quite tired of apologizing for it. “Yes, there are all these terrible things wrong with it,” she says, sighing. “But if we leave, what replaces it? Fundamentalism. And nothing makes me more loyal to the church than when people say stupid things like: ‘You’re a Catholic, how could you write a sexual novel?’ Would anyone say that to a Jew or a Protestant? These people don’t understand that ‘Spending’ is actually a very Catholic novel.”

For one thing, she argues, Catholicism, with its reliance on mystical ritual, its use of parable and metaphor, its emphasis on the physical manifestations of the spirit, is one of the more sensual religions.

“And Monica is really dealing with the vocation of art, the giving over of and the losing of self, of allowing herself to experience the abundance of the world, which marks the best of Catholicism, the part many people often forget--the sense of celebration.”

If this makes her character seem self-centered, so be it. Gordon is more concerned with creating a joyful character. “You have to keep in mind what it takes for a woman to be called self-centered. If a mother doesn’t make her kids Halloween costumes, she’s a bad mother. If a father doesn’t sodomize his child, he’s a good father. It’s all relative.”

The novel examines the relativity of gender roles--for instance, if a woman accepts money from her lover, is she a whore? If a man loses his money, is he a failure? Gordon takes these questions seriously but discusses them with a kind of earnest good humor, so that suddenly it seems there is indeed hope for us all.

“It can be hard for a man when the woman is making more money than he is,” she says, “but there isn’t this specter of whoredom. Being a gigolo does not spring to a man’s mind. The problem in that scenario is that when a woman out-earns a man, she is still faced with much higher domestic responsibility. We thought if we gained economic parity, we would achieve domestic parity. And we didn’t. The only good thing,” she adds, “is that when you are a working mother, you become very very efficient.”

*

These are not hollow words. In the past 20 years, Gordon has managed to write and publish almost continually while teaching at Barnard College (where she met her husband, a fellow writer and English professor) and raising the children, the first of whom is preparing to leave the nest.

“We’re looking at colleges,” she says. “It’s very frightening. I want her to choose someplace where I can at least have lunch with her once in a while.”

She has a book of essays on the importance of place during childhood due out soon and another novel--about a mother and daughter--in the works. Besides, she’s got Monica, with her grown daughters, as something of a blueprint.

“It’s true,” she says, laughing. “After you get through the child-rearing years, when you are usually so tired you want to snap, you have more time for your work. And you have all this energy. That’s what the book is about really--that the world is finally a better place for women in middle age. Women who are healthy, creative and sexual. We have energy for all sorts of things.”