Final Payments

Zusatztext “A first class writer. . . . A splendid balancing act of the intellect and the emotions on a high-tension wire.”— The New York Times "A novel of great vitality and wit. . . . It can be read on many levels and enjoyed on every one of them." — Philadelphia Inquirer "Incredibly perceptive and good."— Houston Chronicle "Every so often a first novel of extraordinary quality . . . becomes a commercial as well as artistic success. . . . It couldn't happen to a better novel."— Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending , The Company of Women , The Rest of Life , Final Payments , and The Other Side , as well as the memoir The Shadow Man . She has received a Lila Wallace--Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. Klappentext When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge. A moving story of self-reinvention, Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.My father's funeral was full of priests. Our house had always been full of priests, talking to my father, asking his advice, spending the night or the week, leaving their black shaving kits on the top of the toilet tank, expecting linen towels for their hands. A priest's care for his hands is his one allowable vanity. They prided themselves on being out of the ordinary, the priests who came to visit my father. One of their jokes was that non-Catholics thought that they argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, not knowing that that was a ridiculous question: angels were pure spirits; they did not dance. No, it was the important questions that absorbed them. They argued about baptism of desire, knocking dishes of pickles onto the carpet in their ardor. They determined the precise nature of the Transubstantiation, fumbling for my name as I freshened their drinks. All these priests wept at the cemetery, and I did not weep, for my father, whom I loved. I stood behind Father Mulcahy and concentrated on the way his pink skull showed through his white hair. I liked his shoes; they were edible-looking, winking out from under his perfect cuffs. Even as I observed these details, I knew I was wrong to do it; I knew the clarity of my mind was unseemly. They lowered the body of my father. I would never see him again. Do not think that because I did not weep, because I am capable of ironic statements about his behavior, I attach to my father's existence less than a murderous importance. I gave up my life for him; only if you understand my father will you understand that I make that statement not with self-pity but with extreme pride. He had a stroke when I was nineteen; I nursed him until he died eleven years later. This strikes everyone in our decade as unusual, barbarous, cruel. To me, it was not only inevitable but natural. The Church exists and has endured for this, not only to preserve itself but to keep certain scenes intact: My father and me living by ourselves in a one-family house in Queens. My decision at nineteen to care for my father in his illness. We were rare in our situation but not unique. It could happen again. My father's life was as clear as that of a child who dies before the age of reason. They should have had for his funeral a Mass of the Angels, by which children are buried in the Church. His mind had the brutality of a child's or an ange...

Product details

• Authors: Mary Gordon
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.06.2006
• EAN: 9780307276780
• ISBN: 978-0-307-27678-0
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature