DAYS OF ART AND ROSES

MARY GORDON'S SPICY NOVEL OF DESIRE, MONEY, AND THE FINE ARTS OF THE SENSES

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 1, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

Well, Gordon herself might argue that descriptor; ``Spending'' uses its narrator-protagonist's role as an artist to justify, or at least counterbalance, the novel's baser impulses. But we know from the opening pages that we're witnessing a writer on a larky quest: It's clear from the cheerfully insolent asides, the vacation-aura ambience, the gum-cracking, conversational voice. All of which is inviting, the way Chinese take-out or Celtics tickets at the last minute are inviting. You don't have to roll up your sleeves or even furrow your brow to take on ``Spending''; neither do you get the payback of a starkly literary novel or one that travels very far beyond its own romantic milieu. Its artistic insights notwithstanding, what ``Spending'' really offers is a testament to shameless pleasure -- willfully indulged joys in a world where the bill never comes, where no stern God or taskmaster is waiting to deliver the quid pro quo pound of pain at the end.

Hence Gordon's parenthetical subtitle, ``A Utopian Divertimento,'' which partly explains how she could put her protagonist, Monica Szabo, in bed with a guy for 300 pages before telling us his name or much about his appearance. We learn instead that ``B'' is a fabulously wealthy commodities trader with a good-enough middle-aged body and infinite appetites, most of which concern Monica. She meets him one summer while giving a lecture at a Provincetown art gallery, where she rhetorically asks her audience where all the male Muses are. ``Right here,'' B announces from the audience, and there begins a story in which Monica, the 50-year-old feminist princess from Queens, will get everything she wants.

Including, for starters, the unquestioning patronage of B, who leaves his cocoa and pork bellies unattended long enough to feed his struggling artist caviar and champagne, bribe a DJ to play her soul music all night long ($500 gets you a lot of Motown), and book first-class tickets to Rome for the weekend. Among these diversions is sex: perfect sex, tender sex, wild and endless sex, on beaches and airplanes, in Provincetown glass houses and Upper West Side apartments. No one ever wears out in ``Spending,'' except perhaps the reader, who gets a crick in her neck from reading about all those positions.

But yes, Gordon is pretty good at writing erotica, a task more difficult than it seems, and one that has leveled many a terrific writer. It's just that it gets boring after a while (sex, like dreams, is generally more interesting to the participants than to anyone else). And sometimes the material luxuries of ``Spending'' start to seem irritating; if you don't already know what a substantive writer Gordon is (and that this novel is probably a prescribed exercise in hedonism), she just sounds like Judith Rossner on a really good day. Far more compelling is Monica's artwork, or rather, Gordon's skills at conveying the visually sublime through prose. Watching her lover in the blurry fatigue of post-coital rest, Monica realizes she has seen that look before: The masters painted it for ages, when the only representation allowed them was religious. All those dead Christs, she realizes, didn't look dead -- they looked spent, instead, in the eternal rest of ``le petit mort.''

Thrilled by this scandalous speculation, Szabo sets out to paint a series based on the Italian Renaissance masters' portraits; she spends hours, then months, studying and drawing Carpaccio and Bronzino and Mantegna. She tells us what she thinks of Piero della Francesca's mischievous egg hanging over the virgin; about the ``livid light'' surrounding the feet of Mantegna's Christ; about the ``paralysis of visual absorption'' that is every artist's gift and duty. Eventually she turns to B as her living model of this spent, secularized desire, finding there the body and weight and soulfulness she knows from the inside out.

For ``Spending'' is partly about the female experience of work and passion: the intimate territory where sensuality and aesthetic truth are interdependent, where artistic achievement isn't defined or harnessed by cerebral restraint. Leave it to Gordon to slip such themes in between her Jacuzzis and bouillabaise and silk pajamas; when Monica isn't feeding her own furnace of lust, she's relying on B for all the comforts that male artists have enjoyed from their women muses for centuries. But this isn't only a feminist Cinderella tale, where the risen artist gets her hour upon the stage. The greater rewards are in Gordon's writing about Monica thinking about art: about the subtext implicit in a still life of tulips, or the moral sense of Vermeer and his ``evocation of emptiness.'' Even when she's trying to take the day off, Mary Gordon still sounds (and thinks) like Mary Gordon.

Which is also why ``Spending'' is further populated by familial love and angst (Monica's 20-year-old twin daughters), as well as some good-hearted supporting characters that flesh out this story of sentient reward -- of ``the love of what is not required.'' In spite of charges of blasphemy and a few other pitfalls, Monica triumphs: There will be no payback in this novel, an idea more unnerving than it sounds. (Aware that what I had here was a fairy tale, I still kept waiting for the other shoe to drop; whether this suggests my familiarity with Gordon or my own skeptical assumptions about life and fiction, I've no idea.) But ``Spending'' thoroughly enjoys itself as it expects you to enjoy it: The novel could almost be a spoof on the romance genre, except that it's a little too immersed in those conventions, brand-name and fantasy alike, to be fully wicked. If the Cinderella here gets everything she ever desired, you can be sure that wish list included Hermes as well as eternal love.