With A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), her fifth novel, Gail Godwin joined that select circle of critically praised authors who have also produced bestsellers. This happy event entitled her longtime admirers to mixed emotions. While it is pleasurable to see a favored writer receive the success she deserves, it is irksome to realize that membership in a small club of discriminating readers has suddenly been thrown open to multitudes. If so many people, the reasoning follows, liked Godwin's loose, loving chronicle of three plucky females, then maybe we should find it disappointing. And whom will she write for next time, all of them or us?
The Finishing School should thoroughly satisfy both of Godwin's constituencies. It is at once her most artful and accomplished novel and an old-fashioned, irresistible page turner. The plot, like that of A Mother and Two Daughters, is set in motion by the death of a father and the adjustments demanded of the women he protected. But this time Godwin has made things harder on the survivors, particularly a young daughter who must endure a brief but harrowing rite of passage toward maturity.
Justin Stokes, 40, a successful stage actress, looks back on the summer she turned 14 and staked her claim on a future. In the beginning, the teen-age girl feels doomed by fate, with fair reason. Within the past two years, her mother's patrician parents, who helped raise her in a grand Virginia house, have both died. Then her father is killed in a car accident. Justin's mother must transplant her and her younger brother to a village in upstate New York, to the tidy, stultifying suburban home of Aunt Mona, the late husband's sister. Stunned by her losses and longing for the old days "before everybody started dying," Justin mopes and takes solitary bike rides through this alien Yankee territory. On one such foray, she discovers a tumbledown hut by the side of a pond and decides to investigate. When she sees a woman inside, lying on a blanket and reading a book, Justin screams.
She will scream again, as it happens, by this same hut, near the end of her story; Justin's creator endows memory with intricate patterns of repetition. Between these two outbursts, the girl finds herself "enchanted" and "bewitched" by the woman she has stumbled across. Ursula DeVane, 44, lives in a stone house her ancestors put up two centuries earlier; she shares the place with her younger brother Julian, a melancholy piano teacher whom ^ Ursula is determined to force into fulfilling his early promise as a concert performer. To this end, she has sacrificed her own career as an actress and successive parcels of the family's properties.