Spending
Gordon, Mary
ALL EXPENSES PAID Robert H. Bell W ary Gordon's new novel is immensely engaging fun, a delightful romp by an author distinguished for narratives of rigorous self-denial, harrowing d i s...
...A former student presents Monica with a bouquet...
...Soon, I predict, to be a maior motion picture...
...Her sister Helena says to B, "We have something else in common...
...Gordon magically releases Monica from the restrictions of reality and cleverly reverses conventional patterns...
...Your body weighs nothing...
...Swimming naked, Monica thinks, "Movement is utterly easy...
...Without more intractability-vulnerabilities, inconsistency, ornerin e s s - t h e r e ' s inadequate conflict between what Yeats terms "the perfection of the life or of the work...
...Ramsay in Woolf's To the Lighthouse...
...When his herniated disk requires Monica's ministration and some erotic accommodation, B is only temporarily grumpy and the problem just disappears...
...But B, love-struck, blind to cellulite and sag, not to mention his beloved's vanity and egocentricity, isn't the only character who feels Monica's "incredible power" and "appeal...
...Yours, only yours, is gold...
...It would be quite easy to fly up, and float away...
...When you were younger did you think you looked like Hedy Lamarr...
...Financing her project and modeling her subjects, he is her sugar daddy, spending lover, and savior...
...Viewing Monica's new series, "Spent Men,'" Monica's agent exclaims, "It's the most exciting work I've seen in a long time...
...in Theology _9 Ph.D...
...What she creates is, like Monica herself, outrageous and irresistible, a series of postcoital variations on classic versions of Christ's passion (her theory being that the Christs of the old masters represented le petit mort...
...I found Monica a fully realized, compelling, intriguing figure...
...Monica knows very clearly what she wants and rather less clearly what she is, an incurable narcissist...
...Monica seems too abundantly endowed, the recipient of excessive authorial affection and regard, or perhaps an idealized, privileged surrogate for the author...
...Robert H. Bell is William R. Kenan Professor of English at Williams College...
...ALL EXPENSES PAID Robert H. Bell W ary Gordon's new novel is immensely engaging fun, a delightful romp by an author distinguished for narratives of rigorous self-denial, harrowing d i s i l l u s i o n m e n t , and p a i n f u l self-discovery...
...When she momentarily worries that she could afford to lose ten pounds, doting B responds, "My God, you d o n ' t know much, for all you think you know...
...A vibrant novel Spending has limited ambitions and effects, and it eventually runs out of steam...
...Monica's benefactor t3 is insubstantial and flagrantly fantastic: a rock of support, a geyser of praise, a faithful, worshipful lover, amusing but never threatening, a Wall Street futures trader who wittily quotes T. S. Eliot, and who is ready, willing, and able to drop everything and serve Monica's purposes...
...He would watch you, flying up, floating away, not at all surprised because the whole time he'd thought you were miraculous...
...Monica is not only romantically and artistically enabled but blissfully freed from the exigencies of reality...
...As its subtitle suggests, Spending locates us in the land of makebelieve, what if, and once-upon-a-time...
...Instead of being the objectified object of the male gaze, Monica stars in her own show...
...Gordon's premise is delicious: what if a fifty-year-old painter, divorced mother of twin girls, were offered patronage, and much more, all her heart desires, by a wealthy, sexy, adoring benefactor...
...B views Monica as miraculous...
...Commonweal 2 8 April 10, 1998 Another of Monica's endearing qualities is a tenderness for humankind, including males...
...Monica has an insatiable need for praise, an urgent, incessant throb...
...Spending is "The Unbelievable Lightness of Being...
...Still, if you're looking for an artful indulgence of appetite, and a joyous spring fling, Spending is your ticket...
...I think you're a very, very good painter...
...Encountering no resistance enables floating and fantasy but limits fiction and life...
...She describes the process of painting and works of art with vivid, passionate fervor...
...She's closer to the artist's dirty little secret when she admits what she'd really like to hear: "Every other living painter's work is shit...
...THEOLOGY For more than 40 years, Marquette University has provided a tradition of excellence in graduate theology for lay men and women, clergy and religious...
...She's very nearly as persuasive depicting realIy good sex as she is describing Vermeer...
...Programs _9 M.A...
...And you know there's nothing you can do that he won't like...
...Committed to scholarship and dialogue within American Catholic theology, Marquette offers a diverse faculty nationally recognized in theological research...
...He's watching you and you're watching yourself...
...I knew the idea was great but the execution is a triumph...
...Monica's adventures are amusing and entertaining but not richly dramatic...
...Don't you know the incredible power of what you've got there...
...If only...
...Hence the title of her series, "Spent Men," and the punning title of Gordon's novel...
...Spending romanticizes artistic experience without studying the costs of artistic commitment...
...you're working against nothing, what you're in wants you to move in it, with it, it offers no resistance, only help...
...Floating into intimacy with B, she thinks, "You can't possibly lose...
...And she is persistently smart and funny: "Nothing marks the death of desire like the moment when you find yourself thinking that the ex-wife had a point...
...She is the maker, he is the model...
...We both think my sister's a great painter...
...I think one day you might be great...
...Even his gesture, "you don't know much," yields to a paean of praise...
...So full of loving-kindness and devoted patience is B that he is an apt model of Christ...
...Thus "B" presents himself, irresistibly, to the dedicated, talented Monica Szabo, our narrator and heroine...
...She's a wonderful synthesis of Lily Briscoe and Mrs...
...She's got it half-right when she comments, "Maybe I have trouble accepting praise because my hunger for it is so boundless...
...in Religious Studies Areas of Study _9 Biblical Theology _9 Historical Theology _9 Systematic Theology _9 Theological Ethics _9 Theology and Society Financial Assistance _9 Tuition Scholarships _9 Teaching/Research Assistantships Commonweal 2 9 April 10, 1998...
...Of the appeal of that endless responsiveness, and all its variety...
...If anyone deserves a holiday from conscience and an interlude with the pleasure principle, it's the writer of Final Payments, The Company of Women, and the recent memoir, The Shadow Man...
...To hear such stuff is a major motive to fall in love...
Vol. 125 • April 1998 • No. 7
