Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin

"Unfinished," indeed.  I enjoyed reading Unfinished Desires by Godwin, but at the end I was disappointed that the characters did not offer any evidence of growth.  Even though everybody is fifty years older at the end of the story, nobody seems to have changed except in hair style and mobility. 

Godwin created a suspenseful story with sufficiently complex narrative style to keep the reader moving between 2001 and 1951-52, when the primary eventsof the plot occur.  The book is set at a prestigious Catholic girls' school, run by cranky but powerful Mother Suzanne Ravenel.  The antagonists, including students and former classmates, come from two of the town's wealthiest families.  Dead or dysfunctional mothers abound in this book, and they never really achieve any sort of redemption, nor do the snotty girls who attend the school and grow up to be snotty women.

Meanwhile, the stereotype of nuns as frustrated  lesbians gets full treatment in Godwin's depiction of life among the sisters.  The founders of the order were two "old maids" (meaning, unmarried women in their twenties,) from England who came to the United States to establish a girls' school for wealthy families in the first part of the twentieth century.  Here the reader confronts one of the many perplexing motives within this book.  If these two characters were so driven to serve God selflessly that they converted to Catholicism and sought opportunities to serve, wouldn't a poorer community have been a better choice?  Instead, the two founders seem to be motivated by their desire to live out their lives as a couple in mutual satsfaction, without anyone questioning their intimacy.  Godwin hints at his, though she never deals with the issue outright.  The unfinished desires of the title refer to Suzanne Ravenel's attempts to do the same with the love of her life, who rejects her despite their promises to take vows together. If even the title of the book refers to women who love each other and cannot fulfill the relationship, a more honest and authentic treatment of the topic seems necessary for this book to fulfill its promise to the reader.

While Godwin writes smoothly and affectionately about her chracters, she does not allow them the complexity of inner change, and, consequently, I felt empty by the book's end.   Godwin herself is a graduate of St. Genevieve's School, which seems to have served as a model for the setting of this work of fiction.  She states in her acknowledgements that the true-life setting of her school "reman[s] vivid in my memory and dreams."  Perhaps it was necessary for her to flatten out her characters to avoid offending any past mentors or classmates, and I feel disappointed that we did not get a more realistic treatment of real people in a setting that carries so much meaning for its writer. 

Godwin's prose is effortlessly graceful and her treatment of spiritual topics is natural and informed.  In that sense I always enjoy her work, and my anticipation of her next book is not diminished by my sense of disappointment in the way this one ends.