Final Payments (1978) by Mary Gordon

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Final Payments (1978)

by Mary Gordon

Queens, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 15/26

New York: 91/105

  In 2017, a New York Times reviewer of Gordon's most recent novel called her, "the bard of the American Catholic experience" but then goes right on to say that perhaps she hasn't gotten due credit because most serious readers in this country think Catholicism is stupid and its avid followers are idiots.  I don't agree with the former sentiment- there is plenty interesting about Catholicism, as indeed, there is about every succesful world religion, but I do agree with the second sentiment: that practicing Catholics tend not to be very interesting people because of the requirements of the faith to not ask certain questions and to definitely follow certain arbitrary rules because "God says."   I'm also always thinking about the hundreds of years the Catholic church spent trying to prevent normal people from reading the Bible because it was "dangerous" and of course the Inquisition is a personal sore spot as someone who was raised Jewish.  Catholicism has been systematically eliminating people who think differently and take issue with authority for over a millennium. 

 For this reason I would Final Payments in the "boring protagonist" category of books on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.   The thirty year old protagonist, Isabel Moore, is a woman who has spent her entire adult life caring for her bed-ridden father, a once prodigious Catholic intellectual who has served as the guiding light of her part of Irish-Catholic Queens.  As a care-taking gig, the requirements of her dad seem particularly onerous- at one point she recalls how she only got one hour to herself outside the house and had to do that by skipping Church, which is the only reason she was allowed to leave the house.

  At the beginning of the book, her father dies leaving Isabel Moore adrift.  She has two friends in the world- one a divorced lady living in Manhattan and the other a married mother living unhappily with her local pal husband outside of Albany (I think?)  After the funeral, Isabel lands a gig surveying in home caretakers of indigent elderly people and almost immediately bangs her friends husband and commences an extra marital affair with the second man she meets, a friend of her married friends (whose husband she bangs almost immediately). 

  Of course, this renders her apoplectic with guilt, particularly after she is confronted by the wife of her married lover in public, and she ends up retreating to the home of her Father's caretaker, who she had maliciously fired after her father's stroke so that she wouldn't be around anymore. 

Her Dad sounds like an absolutely atrocious human being, his career highlight being a stint as a speech writer for pre-disgrace Joseph McCarthy.   It's not so much that Isabel is unlikable as much as she is simply not an interesting human being.  It is, however, a good book for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America for the solid depiction of a working-class Irish-American neighborhood in Queens- a valuable piece of the New York City jigsaw puzzle.