SOURCE: “Last Exit to Queens,” in The New Republic, December 18, 1989, pp. 39-41.

[In the following essay, Bell offers an overview of Gordon's literary career and tempered evaluation of The Other Side.]

Young writers do not as a rule take commanding possession of a literary world, religious or social, with a first novel. Their fictional property rights, so to speak, need to be confirmed in a continuing body of work. But when Mary Gordon published her first novel, Final Payments, at the age of 29, it was acclaimed not only for the dazzling intensity of her prose, but for the indisputable authority of her portrayal of the Irish-Catholic working class in Queens, that least urban and most provincial of the New York City boroughs. With that single novel she established her dominion as a writer in the time and the place she knew best.

There have been relatively few Catholic writers in the United States. The Protestant culture found its literary landscape in the small towns and rural regions of America, while Jewish writers in the last 40 years have dominated the urban scene. Most of the novelists born into Catholic families, like John O'Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had no interest in writing about their religion. Except for J. F. Powers, who has portrayed the everyday life of parish priests in the Midwest with wry sympathy, no significant name comes to mind. （There are popular novelists like James Carroll and Andrew Greeley, but their work is entertainment, not art. Does anyone read James T. Farrell anymore?）

Nor are there many women who write as Catholics. In the South, Flannery O'Connor, a devout believer, envisioned the timeless mysteries of God and the Devil in grotesque and violent forms. But in Mary McCarthy's brittle novels about urban intellectuals, there's scarcely a hint of religion of any persuasion, and the very title of her autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood indicated that her ties to the Church were among the “childish things” she put away, not exactly in the spirit of St. Paul, when she grew up.

In her first two books, Gordon dealt with the conflicts that all young people experience in coming of age, though her particular terrain was Irish Catholic Queens. Final Payments and The Company of Women were abundantly rich in detail about Catholic ritual, custom, and belief, the kind of intimate knowledge only a cradle Catholic can possess. Yet each novel was a kind of bildungsroman. Each described a mettlesome young woman who slowly and painfully realizes that only by rejecting the repressive interdictions of the Church can she be free to enjoy “the rewards of a reasonable life.”

In Final Payments, Isabel Moore has sacrificed a precious decade of youth to the care of an invalid father, a man whose faith is so unyielding and austere that he believes “the refusal of anyone in the 20th century to become part of the Catholic Church was not pitiable; it was malicious and willful.” Even after she is released from filial bondage by her father's death, Isabel does not question her certainty that “what I came from was far more compelling than what I was.” After a brief fling with a married man, she scuttles back to her cocoon of piety, and the specious purity of self-abnegation, to atone for her transgression. We are told that in time Isabel finds the courage to liberate herself, sexually and otherwise; but exactly how and why she managed this about-face remains unclear.

Of course such dramatically abrupt changes of heart and mind are a stock feature of coming-of-age novels, and Gordon did not resist their tidy appeal. What redeemed Final Payments from banality and predictability, however, was its descriptive eloquence and its metaphoric freshness. Though it seemed obvious that Gordon conceived her heroine's pursuit of “ordinary human happiness” in terms of worldly feminism, she emphatically declared in an interview that “I have a real religious life in a framework which I think of as Catholic.”

Is it possible to be both a devout Catholic and a radical feminist? To someone who is neither it sounds, I confess, like an oxymoron. Feminists within the Church want to lift the ban on the ordination of women because they feel they deserve a share of hierarchical power. Yet their commitment to the Roman faith remains intact. They would not assent for a moment to the inimical judgment of divinity expressed by Felicitas, the young rebel in The Company of Women, who smugly announces at the end of the book that she has hardened her heart against God: “I will not accept the blandishments of the religious life; I will not look to God for comfort, or for succor, or for sweetness. God will have to meet me on the high ground of reason, and there he's a poor contender.” How Flannery O'Connor would have shuddered at this self-righteous blasphemy.

There is ambivalence, there is confusion, at the heart of this second novel, and Gordon seemed unable, or unwilling, to deal with it. The conservative priest Father Cyprian has pinned his highest hopes on the child Felicitas. If she abides by his counsel, she will attain the spiritual purity that in his view is increasingly defiled in the modern world. But she cruelly rejects his dream, enrolls at Columbia rather than a Catholic college, has an affair with a dopey radical professor （heavy-handedly caricatured）; becomes pregnant, and bears an illegitimate child. Cyprian is crushed by her rebellion. Still, even though Gordon obviously sees him as a representative of the old, intransigent, pre-Vatican II order of the Church, he is the most compelling and complex character in the novel. In the end, the anguished old priest has more profound moral weight, is more credibly human, than the arrogantly self-satisfied heroine.

Perhaps it was Gordon's inability to resolve the emotional tug-of-war between sanctity and emancipation that accounts for the absence of Catholicism from her third novel, Men and Angels, in which religion takes the menacing form of non-denominational lunacy. Anne Foster, a supposedly intelligent and sensitive woman, much given to tiresome rumination about the precariousness of human existence, has entrusted her children to a live-in baby sitter who's more than a little peculiar. We know it will all end horribly because Gordon spins out the demented girl's lurid fantasies about the Spirit of Vengeance and the Chosen of the Lord at tedious length, but exactly what this character is supposed to illustrate is hard to grasp.

If Gordon is trying to say that any form of religious fanaticism is a kind of madness, she doesn't convey this judgment persuasively. And if she means the novel to be a celebration of motherhood, Anne is too deplorably lacking in the common sense a mother must have to protect her children from danger. Gordon couldn't make up her mind, it seems, about any of the questions she raised in Men and Angels, and the result was a weak and muddled book lacking all conviction.

Gordon's new novel, The Other Side （as the Irish of Ireland called the beckoning land across the sea）, is her most ambitious work so far, and it brings her back to where she started, to the Irish Catholics of Queens. Instead of a bravely independent young woman straining against the repressive leash of the Church, Gordon has expanded her sights to encompass five generations of a large family, each unhappy in its own fashion.

Shuttling restlessly between past and present, between the bogs of Ireland and the streets of New York, the story is framed by the events of one day in the summer of 1985, when the entire clan has gathered in Queens to await the homecoming of the patriarch, 88-year-old Vincent MacNamara. For months he has been recuperating in a nursing home from a broken hip. In the arresting episode that begins the family saga, we learn how he was injured: his 90-year-old wife, Ellen, battered by years of strokes, knocked him down in a sudden access of wild rage, and wandered out of the house in her nightgown. In the ensuing months she has become almost completely insensible, but she is fitfully tormented by memories of the past that whirl through her ruined head like the bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope.

Indeed, anger has been Ellen's life-blood since childhood, the agitated sinews of her being, and even on her death-bed she can still cry out curses that terrify the family. In a bravura passage, Gordon summons up the soul of this difficult woman with majestic dread:

Within the nearly visible skull, the brain, disintegrating fast, reaches back past houses, curtains, out to ships and over oceans, down to the sea's bottom, back, down, to the bog's soaked floor, to mud, then to the oozing beds of ancient ill will, prehistoric rage, vengeance, punishment in blood.

Neither time nor her husband's long-suffering devotion has pacified Ellen MacNamara, who has been raging against the ways of God and man through most of her 90 years. As a girl in Ireland she despised the priests, and hated her father for transforming her beautiful mother into a gibbering imbecile. Now, as the old woman tosses and raves in her bed, the bitter harvest of her unassuageable fury is reaped by her descendants. One daughter is a hard-hearted martinet armored in righteous Catholic piety, and the other has become a whining drunk wallowing in self-pity. Both of them blame everything that has gone wrong in their lives on the mother who could not love them.

Only two of the grandchildren, Camille and Dan, have known a gentler side of Ellen, and in the younger generation only they have felt an enduring affection for her. But it has not enabled them to straighten out their lives any more successfully than the others. Each of the grandchildren has been maimed in some way by thwarted hopes. They feel no pleasure in each other's company, and the air of the old house in Queens is soured by animosity and resentment.

We wait for the tension to break, for a storm to erupt. It does not happen. The novel's wavelike oscillation back and forth in time and space prevents the story from gathering the momentum it badly needs. The disjointed structure that Gordon has imposed on the MacNamara family saga, crosscutting nervously from one cousin's life story to another, makes it a considerable effort to keep the different characters firmly in mind.

It has been said that every modern American writer eventually tries a Hollywood novel and an immigrant novel. Not only Jewish writers, though they have perhaps been the most prolific, have been drawn to it time and again: the immigrant experience has been one of the great American subjects, indeed the unending American subject. Growing up in Nebraska, Willa Cather so fully absorbed the suffering and the triumphs of the Bohemian and Scandinavian pioneers flowing onto the prairie that she wrote some of her finest novels （My Antonia, The Song of the Lark） about those hardy European settlers, though she was not one of them.

As far as I know, the life of the immigrants from Ireland has been much less fully explored in American fiction, and it is this stream in the westward migration from Europe that has provided Gordon with the strongest sections of her new novel. She evokes with considerable power the harrowing life that Irish immigrants endured in New York before the First World War.

Just off the boat, not yet 20 years old, Vincent took the first job that came along, digging the I.R.T. subway tunnel in the bowels of the city. For the country boy from Cork, those were “terrible days at first, he couldn't get used to working underground. The heat, the stink. Exhaustion in the bones and worse; filth you could never get away from … the beast's work that required no mind: digging, nothing to understand.” Ellen, just as young and green, thought herself lucky to find a job as maid to a woman she despised, then became a seamstress in a sweatshop, hunched over fancy gowns for endless hours, and sleeping in a dark basement room. We can begin to recognize the deep, gnarled roots of her irrepressible rage against fate.

Compared with the poverty and brutalizing labor that engulfed Ellen and Vincent at the start of their life in the new world, how petty and self-indulgent are the grievances and discontents of the younger generation. The pity of it is that Gordon hasn't done more with the immigrant past. Though the eldest MacNamaras are the most completely realized characters in the book, their early years in America are not rendered with the fullness and the depth they deserve. Gordon shifts away too abruptly from the past, which is the riveting heart of her story, to the present, which is far less interesting.

It may very well be that as a novelist Gordon has gone as far as she can with the Irish, and with the Catholic Church. Her feelings about Irishness and Ireland remain fixed in the tension between her two eldest protagonists: Ellen could feel only “anger at the Irish countryside, the harsh soil and the scrub growth, the gorse she hated,” while Vincent never lost his loving memory of the rolling green land, his delight in “the tilled field … the elm or the potato, tender when in leaf.” And, as we have seen, the Catholic world of present-day Queens has become exhausted as well.

In Gordon's literary imagination, Catholicism has lost the vital urgency it had in her earlier work. For most of the present-day generations in The Other Side, the Church has no significance, not even as something they long to escape from. In the lives of the younger MacNamaras, as in the lives of the young in other ethnic worlds, the defining influence of religion and the European past has become meaningless, and they are of a piece with the rest of their age. Now that her world no longer holds together, where will this remarkable writer turn next?