(2 of 2)
Part III, the concluding section of the novel, finds Felicitas, her mother, baby Linda, Father Cyprian and his faithful band living near one another in western New York. Prodigal daughter and priest now talk about home improvements, not theology. For physical comfort, Felicitas has Leo, a kind, oxlike hardware store owner to whom she proposes marriage while killing bats. Here is Gordon's prose at its finely detailed, rhythmic best: "There were 16 bats, trying to lift themselves off the ground, trying, failing, bringing their wings together in desperation, raising themselves an inch, two inches, then falling. They moved their heads around, following me as I walked, as if they could see me. I thought of Linda's feet, her round translucent toenails, rose-colored, like shells, the perfect circle of her heels, her soles, tough but no match for all this."
The Company of Women has the same strengths and weaknesses as Final Payments. Both novels succeed on the durability and intelligence of central characters who command respect. Both novels have a tendency to slip into lugubriousness and slick schematism. Felicitas' college days contain too much stock footage from the dopey '60s, and though Cyprian's followers illustrate the spiritual dependency of women in a male-dominated church, they remain only illustrations — sketches of romanticized stoicism.
By contrast, Felicitas refuses to subordinate herself to any father figure, including the Almighty. "I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness," she declares. "God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there He's a poor contender." With such ideas, this Catholic woman could be a hero in a Jewish novel.
Excerpt
"I suspect that being fatherless leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical. Having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe. I don't want that for Linda. I had Cyprian, but he fathered me as if we were both bodiless, for our connection had nothing in it of the flesh. But I will sleep with Leo, Linda will know that. And Leo will —know that Linda is an ordinary child, a child of flesh and bone.