abundance of metaphors and similes, militates constantly against what she has called the “twin dangers of the religious life,” dualism and abstractionism. One thinks, for example, of the wealth of detail about Catholic schooling in the first two novels and about Vincent MacNamara’s work on the New York subways inThe Other Side. The fact that Gordon’s most engaging characters tend to be witty reveals a lively appreciation of life in the physical human world. In Final Payments, for example, Liz assesses Isabel Moore’s disastrous hairstyle thus: “Who did your hair? Annette Funicello?” Isabel reflects, “It was a miracle to me, the solidity of that joke. Even the cutting edge of it was a miracle. And our laughter was solid. It stirred the air and hung above us like rings of bone that shivered in the cold, gradual morning.”

In her fiction, Gordon strives to find images to render “the highest possible justice to the visible world.” She is eager, she says, “to get the right rhythm for the inner life, and the combination of image and rhythm to pin down an internal state is terribly important to me. At least as important as any sort of moral report of the world.”

Final Payments

First published: 1978

Type of work: Novel

A young woman comes to terms with her past after the death of her father, an invalid whom she nursed for eleven years.

Final Payments begins and ends with its central character and narrator, Isabel Moore, contemplating the death of her father. For eleven years before his death, she cared for him in his illness. Now, at age thirty, she is determined to invent a life for herself. Before she can embrace life fully, however, Isabel must learn to acknowledge and accept the risks it poses and must come to terms with the legacy she has inherited.

This legacy is cultural, philosophical, emotional, and material. Isabel was raised in a conservative Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Queens, New York. Motherless from age two, she spent her childhood intensely influenced by her father, Joe Moore, a brilliant and opinionated professor vehement in his traditional Catholicism, and by Margaret Casey, their unattractive, life-denying housekeeper, whose jealous devotion to Isabel’s father was as strong as her dislike and disapproval of Isabel, who came to return such feelings. Isabel’s intelligence, wit, elegance, and even her disdain for housework were cultivated in calculated opposition to Margaret’s ways.

Behind Joe Moore’s authority stood the authority of the Church and its educational system, from which Isabel inherited her intellectual legacy. Entailed in this legacy are a respect for authority and a valuing of love as synonymous with life. Isabel learned to love her father in part because he was so certain he was right. Such authority, however, breeds rebellion and courts betrayal. At nineteen, Isabel betrayed her father by having an affair with David Lowe, his favorite student. Three weeks after finding the couple in bed together, Joe Moore suffered a stroke, and for the following eleven years Isabel lived a life of expiation, nursing him and keeping house.

Isabel knew that she had violated the moral standards of both her father and the Church. She comes to confront the conflicts that arise between otherworldly spiritual imperatives and earthly needs. Isabel is perplexed by her desire for pleasure. Is pleasure a good? If not, why does it exist? Is it something for which one must always pay in the end? Isabel has been taught that love is self-sacrifice and that it is the key to identity. How, then, can one live, if the only way to have an identity is to sacrifice one’s very being? Throughout the novel, Isabel contemplates Jesus’s paradoxical dictum that one must lose one’s life in order to save it.

Her father’s death leaves Isabel free but stunned and confused. She is as yet unable to acknowledge the full import of losing him, and at his funeral she does not weep. The middle chapters of Final Payments chronicle her first attempts to move forward. She is aided by two women friends, Eleanor and Liz, whose love and support contrast significantly with Joe Moore’s unbearable emotional demands. Isabel buys new clothes, sells the house she inherited, sets up her own apartment, and secures a job investigating home health care for the elderly. She reflects constantly about the needs of the people with whom she works.

In most of her relationships, Isabel has felt cheated in the act of giving and guilty in the act of getting. Her years of nursing her father left her feeling that she had given up her life for him. Her guilt-inducing relationship with David Lowe is repeated in kind after her father’s death. First she humiliates herself by having sex with Liz’s husband. After Liz forgives her, Isabel proceeds to fall in love with a married man, Hugh Slade. When Hugh’s wife finds out about the affair and confronts her, the guilt-ridden Isabel embarks upon yet another course of expiation.

Isabel chooses the life of a martyr, believing that it will be her salvation. She goes to live with Margaret Casey, devoting herself to the one person she is least capable of loving. She suffers Margaret’s insults and ingratitude; she sacrifices her own beauty by overeating and gaining an enormous amount of weight and by acquiescing to Margaret’s malicious suggestion that she get her beautiful long hair cut and styled unattractively. Depressed, she spends most of her time sleeping. At this low point, Isabel is aided by what is best in her past: her friends and her Catholic habits of mind. Her old friend Father Mulcahy warns her that she is sinning by killing herself slowly. Clearly, losing one’s life in order to find it is not to be equated with destroying oneself, body and spirit.

The import of her own self-destructiveness comes to Isabel in a way that is full of saving ironies. Jealous about Isabel’s visit from Father Mulcahy, Margaret insinuates that Isabel has been behaving improperly with the priest. In the raging quarrel that ensues, Isabel is reminded of a Gospel passage: “The poor you have always with you: but me you have not always.” She interprets these words of Jesus as meaning that the pleasures of life must be taken, because death will deprive a person of them soon enough. She realizes that she has been trying to second-guess death, to give up all she loves so that she will never lose it. On Good Friday, she comes to acknowledge in Christ’ death the mortality of everyone she has loved. Only now is she able to weep for her father. She realizes that “the greatest love meant only, finally, the greatest danger.” In accepting the danger of loss, Isabel affirms life and love.

Isabel then makes her final payment to her past, losing her old life to find renewal in relinquishing her material legacy. She gives Margaret a check for twenty thousand dollars, the money she received from the sale of her father’s house. She rejects strict orthodoxy and returns to her friends. In doing so she preserves the spiritual core of her past; from her Catholic legacy there emerges a Christian redemption.

The Company of Women

First published: 1981

Type of work: Novel

A girl raised by a company of Catholic women and their spiritual adviser searches for “ordinary human happiness.”

The New York Catholic upbringing of Felicitas Taylor, the central character in The Company of Women, is in one respect a near photographic negative of that of Isabel Moore in Final Payments. While Isabel was motherless and raised by her widowed father, Felicitas’s father is dead, and she has not only a mother but three godmothers as well. Each of these four women has been independent of a husband for many years. The practical and wise Charlotte Taylor has worked as a secretary to support Felicitas ever since her husband’s death, just six months after Felicitas was born. Good-humored Mary Rose is a motion-picture theater usher, whose husband has been confined for thirty years to an insane asylum. Clare, an elegant, independent-minded woman, manages a Manhattan leather-goods store. Elizabeth, fragile and impractical, is a schoolteacher, full of imagination and a love for poetry. Hovering in the shadows, never really one of this company of women, is Muriel, who is reminiscent of both the bitter uninvited godmother in “Sleeping Beauty” and the jealous housekeeper, Margaret Casey, in Final Payments. These women came to know one another through Father Cyprian, a conservative Catholic priest, whose retreats for working women they attended during the late 1930’s. Father Cyprian is like Joe Moore in Final Payments in his respect for the Church, his anger at modern society, and his role as an authority figure over the women in his life.

Part 1 of the novel is set in 1963. Its narrative weaves in and out of the minds of these various characters. Love, community, and continuity between generations are crucial themes. Felicitas is the central focus of concern; at fourteen, she is seen by Father Cyprian and the company of women as their hope for the future. Father Cyprian makes her his protégée, teaching her theology , as well as skills such as carpentry, which one would not expect a woman to know. Felicitas sees that Cyprian is bullheaded, dictatorial, and self-centered. These weaknesses distress Felicitas, but even so, she becomes enveloped in his love and determined never to leave him.

Leave him she does, however, when, in part 2 of the novel, dated 1969-1970, Felicitas enrolls at Barnard College to study classics. She has rebelled against her upbringing: She has discarded her faith; secretly she has even been attending peace marches. At Barnard, Felicitas discovers the counterculture. She becomes infatuated with Robert Cavendish, her handsome and charismatic political science professor, who takes her first to bed and then to live at his apartment, which he shares with two young women and a small child who was named Mao, as a tribute to the Chinese Communist leader. Clearly Felicitas’s life with Robert and his friends is meant by Gordon as a deliberate contrast to her childhood. Robert is a parodic, shallow version of Father Cyprian; both men surround themselves with women that they can dominate.

What Felicitas seeks consistently is what she calls “ordinary human happiness.” She senses that in the context of human community, love is the key to such happiness. However, Robert’s commune proves itself as false and inadequate a community as Robert is a lover. Spurning an exclusive relationship, he goads Felicitas to sleep with someone else. Finding herself pregnant and unsure of who fathered the fetus, she seeks an abortion, which in 1970 was an illegal procedure. Horrified at seeing a woman being hustled out of the backstreet clinic, ill and bleeding, Felicitas rushes home to her mother.

Part 3 of the novel is set seven years later, in 1977. Felicitas and her mother are living in western New York near Father Cyprian’s retirement home. Elizabeth, Clare, and Muriel live nearby. The hopes of the group are now focused on Felicitas’s daughter Linda. Felicitas’s own plan is to prepare Linda for ordinary human life, in contrast to the way she was trained by Father Cyprian, who wanted her to be extraordinary. Felicitas intends to marry Leo, a local hardware store owner, in order to give Linda a father and a normal home. True to her name, Felicitas tries to pass on her hope for happiness to her daughter.

This section of the novel is a series of interior monologues by the major characters. However, while in the earlier part of the novel Gordon used the third-person point of view to present the perspectives of various characters, now she changes to first-person narration. In this way, she gives each character a chance to present his or her own last word, completely unmediated. Appropriately, the closing monologue is given to Linda, who represents the future. In it, she muses about love and wonders what happens to it after death. Her final words are, “We are not dying.” Like those words, The Company of Women offers a qualified affirmation of life on earth, celebrating its possibilities and recognizing its limitations.

Men and Angels

First published: 1985

Type of work: Novel

The need to give and receive love is dramatized through the tragic relationship of a professional woman and the mentally disturbed babysitter of her children.

In Men and Angels, Gordon continues her examination of human love and its limitations and of female identity. She explores these issues in the contexts of work, friendship, motherhood, and male-female relationships. Set in the 1980’s in the fictitious small college town of Selby, Massachusetts, this novel dramatizes, in alternating chapters, the sharply contrasting perspectives of two women, Laura Post and Anne Foster. Although in this novel Gordon moves beyond the world of New York Irish Catholicism, she gives this complex and compelling novel a well-defined religious perspective. Its title and epigraph are the words of Saint Paul: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

At the outset, neither Laura Post nor Anne Foster fully understands Saint Paul’s words; neither has come to terms effectively with her own needs to love and to be loved. The spiritual conditions of both women fail to empower them: Laura’s spirituality is diseased, while Anne’s is undeveloped. Their relationship proves to be a fatal combination.

Rejected cruelly in childhood by her mother and neglected by her father, twenty-year-old Laura Post has drifted into the byways of fundamentalist and charismatic religious cults. She has come to address the absence of human love in her life by convincing herself that the Holy Spirit has summoned her to teach children that such love—especially family love—is unimportant. Armed with her Bible, from which she has gleaned texts that seem to reinforce this conviction, Laura comes to Selby, where she meets Anne Foster, who, despite some misgivings, hires her as a live-in babysitter for her children, Peter, age nine, and Sarah, age six.

Laura soon becomes enamored of Anne. She imagines that the Holy Spirit is calling her to save Anne’s soul by freeing her from her family so that she can live alone with Laura, who will lead her to the Lord. On the surface, Laura is reliable and diligent in her babysitting and household chores, but Anne distrusts her and finds her unlikable and intrusive. One day Anne discovers that her suspicions were well founded: Laura endangers the children’s lives by leading them onto thin ice. Enraged, Anne immediately fires Laura. In despair, Laura takes revenge by carving Anne’s name on her wrists and bleeding to death in the bathtub. She leaves the water running, and Anne and her children return home to find a pool of bloodied water in the living room. It is Peter who discovers Laura’s dead body.

The chapters that are narrated from Laura’s point of view powerfully dramatize the workings of an unbalanced mind obsessed with terrible memories and longings. Laura’s thoughts are rendered in sentences whose syntactical simplicity conveys her inability to reason effectually. She is haunted by biblical passages and stories whose sense she passionately contorts. By contrast, Anne’s chapters are more deeply reflective than Laura’s. One dimension of Anne’s experience that broadens and deepens her perspective is her work. Anne is an art historian who is studying the work of Caroline Watson, a neglected but brilliant twentieth century artist. She discovers that Caroline neglected and discouraged her son Stephen, a frustrated artist, who killed himself. Caroline’s efforts to forge a career for herself lead Anne to reflect upon her own professional life. Although she is determined not to sacrifice her children to her career, there are some similarities between Laura’s suicide and that of Stephen.

Although Anne believed at first that her anger in firing Laura was justified, and although Laura was indeed more dangerous than she could have suspected, Anne is left understanding that, Laura’s madness notwithstanding, in her failure to love Laura she is at least partly responsible for her death. Anne has indeed proved capable of loving others, her friends, her husband, and her children, and that love has been returned, even if, as in the case of her marriage, imperfectly at times. Laura, however, was seemingly unlovable; even after her death, Anne can mourn for her but does not find that she loves her, and she is perplexed by this limitation. She is perplexed as well by her new understanding of the ways in which mother love, supposedly the strongest of human bonds, is limited. She realizes that no matter how fervently she may love her children, she cannot protect them from the world’s ravages or from their own mistakes.

The Other Side

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

Four generations of an Irish American immigrant family struggle with their emotional legacies of love and anger.

Gordon’s fourth novel is one of the most vivid presentations in American fiction of the experiences of Irish immigrants in the twentieth century. Centering on the life histories of Vincent and Ellen MacNamara and depicting the lives of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as well, The Other Side is also an intricate and perceptive examination of the dynamics of familial relationships.

Unlike the conventional generational sagas of popular fiction, The Other Side is not linear in structure. The novel focuses on a single day in August, 1985, at the home in Queens Village, New York, in which Ellen and Vincent MacNamara have lived since 1922. The extended family has gathered to welcome the eighty-eight-year-old Vincent home from his long stay in a nursing home, where he has been recovering from a broken hip he suffered when Ellen, a stroke victim suffering from mental disorientation, knocked him to the floor. Although Vincent prefers the friendly community of the nursing home, he is returning home to fulfill a promise he made to Ellen sixty years ago, that he would let her die in her own bed, with him there, rather than among strangers. Moving back and forth in time through the inner reflections of diverse family members, Gordon pieces together a patterned whole whose configurations resemble those of an elaborate patchwork quilt.

The novel is divided into five long sections. Sections 1, 3, and 5 shift in focus from one character to another; their variety of viewpoints balances section 2, told from Ellen’s perspective, and section 4, told from Vincent’s.

Vincent is motivated primarily by love—for his wife, for his children and grandchildren, for his friends, and for life itself. He seeks genuine enjoyment for himself and for those he loves, and although he is a very old man, he is hungry for life. Vincent’s problem is that he can no longer afford Ellen any enjoyment beyond her satisfaction, which she probably will be unable to communicate to him and indeed may never be able fully to feel, of knowing that he has kept his promise not to abandon her. In the final sentence of the novel, as Vincent enters Ellen’s room, the reader finds that “he believes that she can see him, but he’s not quite sure.” Vincent’s power of loving is a power of protectiveness, a crucial issue in Gordon’s fiction.

Paradoxically, the emotion that has ruled Ellen’s life was, in its inception, also protective in kind, even though most of the results have been destructive. Ellen has lived most of her life in passionate anger. As a child in Ireland, she was enraged by her father’s abandonment of her mother, who was driven half mad by a series of failed pregnancies. Eventually her rage empowered her to leave Ireland for America, on “the other side” of the Atlantic Ocean, and to find a new life, but she never put this rage behind her. Despite her husband’s protective love and his integrity, she diffused her rage toward other targets—priests, employers, politicians, her daughters, even Vincent himself. Ellen’s anger comes down hard upon the succeeding generations of MacNamaras, for Vincent’s love proves insufficient as a shield. Her rage is almost palpable in its active force, while Vincent’s love is relatively passive. The power to wound, Gordon implies, is stronger than the power to heal.

The other sections of the novel show how the rest of the family has fared. Ironically, John, the only child of hers whom Ellen could love, died in World War II. Her daughter Magdalene suffers from agoraphobia and alcoholism. Theresa, her other daughter, tries to hide her malice and anger at her mother’s failure to love her behind a facade of charismatic religiosity. All the descendants of Ellen and Vincent are scarred in some critical way. Two of them, however, emerge as potential survivors, Dan and Cam, the grandchildren whom Ellen took into her home and fostered.

Cam has inherited her grandmother’s energy, but it has emerged not as rage but as resourcefulness in the face of difficulty. Despite childlessness, a sexless marriage, and a selfishly domineering mother, Cam has succeeded in defining a satisfying life for herself. She has a lover who cherishes her, professional fulfillment, and the personal strengths of self-respect, keen intelligence, and lively wit. Dan, her cousin and partner in law practice, reveals tenderness and reflectiveness that are like his grandfather’s: “He sees the wholeness of all life, the intricate connecting tissue. It is this, this terrible endeavor, this impossible endeavor. Simply to live a life.” Dan’s response to his family and even to his clients is that he “would like to embrace them all. He would like to say: You must believe this. I understand you all.” This same faith, vision, understanding, and compassion are implicit throughout The Other Side; they are the essence of Gordon’s outlook.

Pearl

First published: 2004

Type of work: Novel

A daughter’s determination to sacrifice her life for a cause brings her mother and her mother’s best friend to reexamines their lives and their values.

Mary Gordon’s novel Pearl begins with a phone call on Christmas night, 1998, from the American embassy in Dublin, Ireland, to Maria Meyers in New York. To her horror, Maria learns that her twenty-year-old daughter Pearl, who had gone to Ireland to study the Irish language, has chained herself to the embassy flagpole, evidently as a protest for peace. Pearl has not eaten for six weeks, and because she has now begun to refuse water as well as food, she is near death from dehydration. In desperation, the embassy has telephoned Maria, hoping that her appearance will convince Pearl to relent.

Maria arranges to take the next plane to Dublin. Before she leaves, however, she telephones her oldest friend, Joseph Kasperman, in Rome, knowing that he will come to Dublin to offer whatever aid he can. Kasperman grew up with Maria; his mother was hired as a housekeeper for the Meyers family after Pearl’s mother died. Pearl’s affection for him is evident in that one of the letters she had written in anticipation of her death was to Kasperman; the other, of course, was to her mother. In the letters, Pearl admits that she knows her death will cause them pain, but she hopes that they will understand.

Although the novel is written in the third person, the perspective is always a limited one. Sometimes it is that of Pearl, often that of Maria, and at other times that of Kasperman. Pearl has finally been unchained and taken to a hospital, where she lies, sedated, her hands tied to prevent her from removing the tubes that keep her alive. Through her thoughts, the author gradually reveals the events that brought Pearl to her decision, among them her feelings of guilt for calling a mentally challenged boy “stupid,” which she thinks caused him to be run over some time later.

On their way to Dublin, both Kasperman and Maria relive the past. After their arrival, since for some days they are forbidden to see Pearl, they continue this process. Though she was reared as a devout Catholic, in the 1960’s Maria became a convert to the radical Left. Even her daughter’s very existence symbolized Maria’s new faith; Pearl’s father was a Cambodian doctor who returned to his country certain that he would be killed. Although Maria was unable to get arrested, she exhibited her principles by making Pearl attend an inner-city school, where she was bullied and poorly taught. Maria now sees that she set Pearl on her present path by teaching her that principles were more important than people. Ironically, Kasperman now sees that he made the same mistake. By making his wife’s musical career the sole purpose of their life together, he ignored their human needs and doomed their marriage.

In the end, all three characters realize that in becoming slaves to abstract principles, they have denied their humanity and that of others. What is essential, they now know, is not a grand gesture of self-abnegation but a life in which every day one loves and forgives others and, just as important, forgives oneself.

The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father

First published: 1996

Type of work: Memoir

In her attempt to find out who and what her father was, the author discovers a great deal about her family and herself.

The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father is a true story. Because he died when she was seven, Mary Gordon’s father was indeed no more than a shadowy presence in her life. Her image of him was derived from her limited memories and from the scraps of his writings that she had in her possession. Gordon had used her impressions of him in creating fictional characters, and she also had written meditations about his death. However, in her middle forties, she still did not know who he really was. Gordon could not obtain any information from her mother, who was in a nursing home, her memory largely gone. However, as a skilled researcher, Gordon knows how to search out facts. This memoir is the account of her search.

The book is divided into five sections. “Knowing My Father” is a collection of her recollections. Gordon begins with his death and a description of the changes that took place in her own life as a result of it. She then moves on to what she calls “films,” fragments that show him with his daughter, taking her places, talking with her. Unfortunately, she is no longer sure about the accuracy of these memories, and therefore she does now know whether her father really was the man she thinks she remembers.

One way to solve the mystery, Gordon realized, was to read what her father had written. She knew that he could translate Vergil; she believed that he had gone to Harvard and then immersed himself in bohemian life in Paris and in London. Years before, she had found his articles and poems in some of the premier publications of his time. She also knew that in the 1920’s he had published a pornographic magazine. Rereading his other articles, however, she finds something much more troubling: that at the very time the Nazis were bent on exterminating the Jews, her father, himself of Jewish ancestry, was mocking his own people and justifying the Holocaust. Against this shocking discovery, Gordon must balance the tender letters that her father wrote to her while he was on his deathbed.

In “Tracking My Father: In the Archives,” Gordon discovers that her father had lied about the date and place of his birth, that he never went to Harvard and never traveled abroad—in short, that he was not the person he pretended to be. In the next section, “Seeing Past the Evidence,” Gordon attempts to reconcile these upsetting truths with her faith in her father’s love for her. Finally, in “Transactions Made Among the Living,” she fits what she now knows of her father with what she can guess about his life with her mother. She knows that he was never accepted by his wife’s family. It troubles Gordon that he was buried with them. She decides to have his remains moved to a cemetery that she often passed when she was with him.

The reburying of her father is in a sense also a resurrection. After losing her faith in him and in her loving memories, the author forgave him, and in that way she has regained him. Like many of Gordon’s novels, The Shadow Man thus ends with the insistence that only charity, in the Christian sense, can give one hope for the future.