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Book Summary and Reviews of Spending by Mary Gordon

Spending by Mary Gordon

Spending

A Novel

by Mary Gordon

  • Published:
  • Mar 1999, 301 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

An erotic and highly intelligent new novel about women, art, sex, and money from the award-winning author of the New York Times bestsellers Final Payments and Men and Angels

Newsweek has called Mary Gordon a "humane, masterly novelist whose great gift is making us care about her people."Monica Szabo, a middle-aged, moderately successful painter, encounters B, a wealthy commodities broker who collects her work. B volunteers to be her muse, offering her everything that male artists have always had to produce great art: time, space, money, and sex. (He is even willing to pose for her.)Soon after she and B become lovers, Monica starts work on a controversial new series of paintings based on her perception that the deposed Christs of Renaissance art were not dead, but postorgasmic. The show of her new work, championed by the critics and picketed by the Christian Right, makes her a media darling and makes her rich. B, meanwhile, suffers a sudden loss of fortune. Will she take care of him as he took care of her? How does he handle his loss of power? How does she? What happens in the bedroom? Passionate, provocative, and highly engaging, Spending displays Gordon's maverick feminism, her extraordinary wit, and her unique perspectives on art, money, men, sex and the desires of women.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Overall, a hearty and satisfying stew of a book; highly recommended." —Library Journal

"Not Gordon's best, but well worth reading." —Kirkus Reviews

This information about Spending was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon is also the author of the novels The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, and The Other Side, as well as a critically acclaimed memoir, The Shadow Man. Winner of the Lila Acheson Wallace Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1996 O. Henry Prize for best short story, she teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

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