Mary Gordon's fiction, like the work of other American writers of the 1970s, reflects the impact of the social and political issues arising from the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. However, for Gordon these issues were peripheral to her central concerns in her first novel. Rather, Gordon asked the contemporary questions in a new context: What is the role of the Irish-American Catholic woman raised in a workingclass neighborhood? What penalties must this woman pay as she attempts to break away from society's traditional expectations of her? What right does she have to pursue her own desires at the expense of those she should be expected to help? Gordon explores these questions of moral responsibility in a society whose values are in turmoil.

Isabel Moore, at age thirty, after eleven years of caring for her widowed, invalid father, enters the outside...