[In the following review, Breslin offers tempered evaluation of The Other Side.]

Mary Gordon's latest novel is also her most ambitious both in length and, more importantly, in scope. That's the good news about the novel, and it is indeed good. The bad news is that the execution isn't quite as good as the idea.

The Other Side covers one day in the life of the McNamara family, four generations of New York Irish-Americans who have most of the vices and some of the virtues of their kind. But that day extends backward over eight decades, and the novel's focus moves from the new world to the old and back.

In a Queens bedroom, the ninety-year-old matriarch, Ellen, lies angrily dying while a hundred miles east in a warmly lit nursing home her husband Vincent reluctantly waits to be brought back to her. In the meantime, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gather in Queens to await the reunion and live out the grudges, resentments, and affections that have grown up across the generations.

But the story of Ellen and Vincent has its roots in Ireland, the most obvious but not the only sense of the novel's evocative title. The dark strain in the McNamara family romance flows in an appropriately Freudian way from a sibling rivalry that sours Vincent's growing up and from a maternal breakdown that destroys Ellen's idyllic childhood and breeds an undying hatred of her ambitious father for abandoning his wife. The long passage of retrospect that limn their troubled departures from home reveal Gordon at her narrative and psychological best. I found that judgment confirmed when, at a reading I attended, she chose to read exclusively from these sections. Here's a sample taken from Ellen's memories of her father's infidelity:

“But it was her job to hate her father. To punish him for leaving them alone in the stone house with only two windows, for allowing Marin Monahan in the house that had been once her mother's. To soil it with her filth. He'd made the mother darken, coarsen, till she looked out at the brown grasses from the moment of her awakening until dark, her only pleasure food, eaten fearfully, and greedily, like an animal. Her mother, once beautiful, now ruined, was her father's work.”

And this from Vincent's recollection of his older brother's vicious killing of a pet lamb in a scene redolent of the Book of Genesis:

“While Vincent looked down at the animal's body, he knew everything. The first thing he took in with calm; it was simple: the animal was dead. The second made him frightened: he could see the remnants of life still within the animal. What happened had just happened. The third thing he knew made fear and anger grow inside his brain, like trees that grow from the same root beside each other, harmful and competitive, yet bound. His brother had done this to harm him. It was Vincent's throat, not the poor animal's, he would have liked to cut.”

After such wounding, what healing? Surprisingly, for Ellen and Vincent, their marriage, tumultuous as its six decades prove to be, offers each the confidence and love they have lacked. Indeed, it is the only successful marriage in the whole novel. The blight they carried with them from the other side infects in one form or another all three of their children and most of the next two generations. It is not a happy family that gathers around Ellen to await Vincent's fulfillment of a vow she had extracted from him early in their marriage that he would never abandon her to an institution. Of all their descendants unto the third generation only Cam and Dan are presented as attractive individuals. Having alienated their daughters and lost their son in World War II, Ellen and Vincent attempt to recoup their losses through these two grandchildren whom they raise as their own. Cousins who become siblings, Cam and Dan inherit both Ellen's fierce determination to change the world and Vincent's calmer acceptance of life's anomalies. They also come to be partners in a local law firm specializing in divorce, a condition each knows intimately. Together they stand against their cousins and their aunts, intent on protecting Ellen and Vincent from their indifference and resentment.

What are we to make of this world of the McNamaras that Mary Gordon has created? Surely, it is an interesting one, especially in the persons of its matriarch and patriarch. The tangle of their love, as expressed in their own ruminations and in the deeply biased reflections of their progeny, confirms Tolstoy's observation about the uniqueness of unhappy families. When Vincent finally does return on the last page of the novel, he confirms what the story has already made abundantly clear:

“He walks through the living room, waving his hand at people, like a politician. He waves at his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren. He has no time for them now.

“He is on his way to his wife.”

In the end, Vincent and Ellen are alone together, more passionate and committed than any of their clan. All the rest, even Cam and Dan, fade into insignificance in the final ambiguous flaring of their lifelong love that closes the book:

“She hears his step in the room and opens up her eyes.”

“He believes that she can see him, but he's not quite sure.”

Vincent and Ellen dominate not only their family but Mary Gordon's novel as well, and both to questionable effect. Ellen's indifference toward her daughters is richly repaid by their hostility, just as her devotion to her son John is recompensed in the way of Irish fatalism with his death in battle. In setting out to do Tolstoy in Queens, Mary Gordon has taken as many risks as her heroine. If the list of family members and their interrelationships that prefaces the novel is a form of homage to her Russian models, it also should forewarn readers that exposition will be in short supply. The narrative shuttles from consciousness to consciousness with names being dropped in an entirely familial way, requiring many flips back to the list of dramatis personae. More seriously, the large cast dissipates both the narrative flow and the dramatic tension of the novel. Too many of the clan are more caricatures than characters, each with a special grudge or a special tic, like daughter Theresa's deadly combination of punishing remarks and charismatic prayers or grandson John's general ineffectualness. The protracted accounts of their unhappiness become tedious after a while, and the reader longs for the sharper passions of Ellen and Vincent which give the novel the genuine power it has.

In spite of these disappointments, I for one look forward eagerly （not anxiously） to Mary Gordon's next novel which I trust will be as daring in its way as The Other Side.