[In the following review, Bell offers positive assessment of The Other Side.]

Mary Gordon's earlier work has demonstrated her expertise in portraying the politics of family life, with its manifold misunderstandings and its complex struggles for power and love. In her fourth novel, she applies this ability to a much larger and more intricate situation than ever before, attempting to account for five generations of the MacNamara family within the space of 24 hours. On the day in question, the elderly Vincent MacNamara is expected to return from a sanitarium, where he has spent several months recuperating from a broken hip, to the house in Queens where his wife, Ellen, lies dying after a series of small strokes. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have gathered for his homecoming, thus supplying the book with some 20 major characters. It is a tribute to Ms. Gordon's artistry that she brings this dauntingly large cast so quickly and surely to life.

Her approach is to cut a cross section through the trunk of these interrelated lives to reveal how they appear at this particular moment to which their histories have brought them—and to expose the fibers that bind them together. Naturally, Vincent and Ellen, the heads of the house, are found at the center. “Terrible, the way it was in families,” thinks Vincent. “He'd never understood it. Why they weren't what they were meant to be, what they could almost be so easily.”

In the MacNamara family, love tends to skip generations. Ellen is uninterested in her daughters, Magdalene and Theresa, caring only for her son, John, who is killed in World War II. Afterward, she seizes his accidentally conceived son, Dan, away from his hapless mother and raises him as her own, while the remainder of her maternal affection goes to Magdalene's daughter, Cam, who has been effectively orphaned by her father's death and her mother's alcoholism. Ellen herself is the survivor of a wretched childhood in Ireland, which she served as the keeper of her insane mother, whom her father abandoned. Vincent's Irish family seems only a little kindlier, and he also arrives in America in flight. With vignettes of memory, the two reconstruct a classic immigrants' tale: lives as laborers, as union organizers, the ascent to the middle class.

The stories of all the MacNamara descendants are also given in marvelously economical capsules. Theresa's three children, John, Marilyn and Sheilah, are all in one way or another crippled by their mother's contempt, which seems to have been inspired by Ellen's indifference to her. That sort of repeating pattern in family history is itself a recurring feature of Ms. Gordon's work. Magdalene's daughter, Cam, and John's son, Dan, who were loved as children, break out of the pattern to some degree, but although they are successful in their partnership as divorce lawyers, they both lead ragged personal lives. Cam is stuck in the shell of a failed and childless marriage, and she cannot solve her perpetual quarrel with her mother, a drunken hypochondriac who hasn't left her room in years. The messily divorced Dan is tormented by guilt over what his departure has done to his own children. Both he and Cam find only limited comfort with their respective lovers, since both are still members of a Roman Catholic culture where adultery is regarded with great seriousness. “The stories told by the women in her family,” Cam thinks, “were always in the service of this: this judgment, without whose proximity they could not, any of them, think of pleasure.”

There's plot enough in The Other Side for several novels, but the main purpose of all the action is to illuminate individual character: what it is and how it comes to be. Ms. Gordon has set out to discover how each self is formed in relation to other selves, to learn to what extent identity is chosen and to what extent it is imposed. The agoraphobic Magdalene supplies a metaphor for this repeating uncertainty in the lives of all the characters: “She sees herself on the street. There is no self there, no shape, nothing to keep her from spilling over into air, into life, into anybody's life. Outside this room she can fly off, she will, there will be no more her, nothing will press down on her to create a shape.”

As Magdalene is shaped by the walls of her room, so are the other characters by other people, by circumstantial relationships that mold for almost every one of them an identity that becomes hardened past any possibility of change. Of all the MacNamaras, only Vincent seems capable of imagining himself as something other than what he is; this capacity serves as a healing force in his marriage when he returns to Ireland to repair some of the damage done by Ellen's vengefully motivated departure many years earlier. But all the others （down to Dan's teen-age daughters Darci and Staci） suffer that hardening of personality that may be an inheritance from Ellen, who is so powerfully intransigent as to break herself with her own strength. In her deathbed reverie, “she wants a stone now for a body, smooth, a weapon, closed. Now her body keeps nothing back.” All the MacNamaras experience themselves as formed, inexorably: such is the tragedy of this family's life.

The spectacle of so many strong and good people so seriously failing one another and themselves would logically become, in a religious context, an image of the fallen world. Mary Gordon is consummately skilled at rendering nuances of religious devotion, which she has handled very differently in her very different books: The Company of Women, for example, treats religious mysticism respectfully and lovingly, while Men and Angels shows an extreme case of it as a psychopathological catastrophe. In this new novel, Catholicism appears more in its influence on ordinary life than in its mystery. The big religious questions are asked, but not dwelt upon. At one point, Vincent tentatively characterizes God as “some person whom your tears will interest,” then asks himself, “And have you made Him up?” The MacNamaras' predicament is presented existentially, and Deus （ex machina or otherwise） does not actually appear.

The Other Side is epic in scope but not in length, and in other hands it might have ended as a snarl of unfinished business. But Mary Gordon's painstakingly cultivated gift for zeroing in on the important emotions with unsentimental precision, and her talent for summing up character efficiently and accurately, make this the best of her several fine books. Although some threads of the plot go dangling, the strands turn out to matter much less than the web. Thus Vincent's questions of faith are answered, somewhat backhandedly, by Dan, who “realizes the nature of his faith. He believes in human frailty. 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.”

“Each unhappy family,” as Tolstoy put it, “is unhappy in its own way,” and under the aspect of eternity the pursuit of happiness may be less important than the pursuer takes it to be. The idea that suffering is the catalyst that gives each soul its essential nature remains at least consistent with the Christian heritage of which Mary Gordon continues to partake. Like Tolstoy, she is a profoundly religious novelist who has obligated herself to understand the lives she invents in strictly human terms.