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The Stories of Mary Gordon
The masterly stories of Mary Gordon return us to the pleasure of this writer's craft and to her monumental talent as an observer of character and of the ever-fading American Dream. These pieces encompass the pre- and postwar Irish American family life she circles in the early Temporary Shelter series, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. Gordon captures the sharp scent of feelings as they shift, the shape of particular lives in their hope and incomprehensibility.
In The Neighborhood, a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. City Life explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. Intertextuality proposes a dream meeting between Proust's characters and the author's aging grandmother. Throughout, Gordon's surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: What were they all, any of them, feeling?one narrator ventures. This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.
With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon's clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.
In The Neighborhood, a seven-year-old who has lost her father finds birthday parties, with their noisy games and spun-sugar roses on fancy cakes, her greatest trial. City Life explores the dark side of Manhattan apartment living. Intertextuality proposes a dream meeting between Proust's characters and the author's aging grandmother. Throughout, Gordon's surprising path to the center of a story is as much a part of the tale as the self-understanding her characters achieve in the process: What were they all, any of them, feeling?one narrator ventures. This was the sort of question no one in my family would ask. Feelings were for others: the weak, the idle. We were people who got on with things.
With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction. Each is a joy to read and a chance to savor Gordon's clear vision: her ability to reveal at every turn what we need and what we wish for, and her willingness, always, to address what comes of such precious wishes.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
480 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2006
28 people are currently reading
321 people want to read
About the author
Mary Gordon
102 books158 followersMary Catherine Gordon is an American writer from Queens and Valley Stream, New York. She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
March 25, 2025
"She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelopes all human souls. See if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!" NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
In stories like "Violation" and "Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year" Mary Gordon assaults the reader with sledgehammer blows, shattering the illusion that sex, tenderness and love are always connected. Rape is my reality, the victim/narrator all but screams at the conclusion of "Violation." Rape, rape, rape, rape! Like Malcolm X raining down curses on white America from a Harlem street corner, Mary Gordon uses her heroine's victim status like a club, forcing the oppressor to face the hatred of the oppressed. Her feminism is not just a call for justice but a scream of vengeance. The fury that drives the sexually damaged women in her greatest stories transcends resentment or bitterness. It's an Ahab-like unquenchable hatred that encompasses all men, all sexual activity, and ultimately all nature and all physical existence.
There's an undeniable exhilaration to reading those brain-battering early stories, written without compromise by an author who was willing to state the most horrifying truths imaginable in the bluntest terms. In the old days Mary Gordon took no prisoners. She told the truth (some of it, anyway) and she wrote with bone-breaking (not to say ball-breaking) force.
Now regrettably, all things human are subject to decay. And when fate summons, monarchs must obey. In her old age, Mary Gordon has grown soft and sentimental, straining to find a vision of virginity triumphant in a modern, vulgar, frighteningly democratic world of racial equality and dirty male desire. But there's a worm in the apple. Mary Gordon can dismiss male desire easily enough, but at the end of the day it's female desire she can't forgive, or even acknowledge. In the old days she could reject temptation and vomit out desire in a draft-riot style paroxysm of rage, the way that crazy old bat throws Bobby Kennedy's statue out the window in "Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year."
But in the new stories, Mary Gordon lets her heroines have it both ways. In "Eleanor's Music," sweet little old Eleanor runs an amateur choir group that sings banal, inoffensive Christmas carols every year, until a drooling homosexual deviant forces them to sing a sex opera about the life of Andy Warhol! (I am not making this up.) Eleanor's virginity remains intact to the end, however, thanks to the fact that her ex-husband was really gay all along. Thank goodness! Evidently Mary Gordon doesn't realize that there are plenty of gay men around who swing both ways and father children. (Just ask King James I of England.) She also doesn't bother to explain why Eleanor's fake marriage is so much more gratifying for all concerned than a real one. The supposed dirtiness and potential violence of sex is no longer written in lightning bolts, it's just sort of lazily assumed. Sentimentality takes the place of savage indignation.
In "The Deacon" a nun named Sister Joan runs a Catholic school in New York City. She's supposedly an effective teacher, a superb disciplinarian, a powerful bad-ass (Mary Gordon loves bad-ass women) but you never actually see her teach her students, or confront their history, or anything like that. (I would have loved to see her teach a lesson on those nasty Draft Riots, especially on why the Catholic Church loves black kids today but was quite literally willing to leave them hanging during the Civil War.) Anyway, tough old Sister Joan is a chain-smoker, and it's astonishing how Mary Gordon makes a sexual fetish out of cigarette smoking, like it proves Sister Joan is a real woman after all. The same applies to her fondness for red meat and alcohol, and the films of W.C. Fields. This stuff is supposed to be charming, but I wasn't convinced. What really comes across is desperate sentimentality, straining to disguise itself as tough-minded realism.
The guilt-driven nun-worship resurfaces in "Blind Spot," where yet another feisty and charming nun pops up out of nowhere and revitalizes a dying Catholic college in the Midwest, only to be foiled by -- you guessed it -- the corrupting horror of villainous male lust. In this case it's the nun's brother, a crude lout who calls himself a Beatnik and poses as an art teacher, who brings the castle of illusions crashing down. Presumably the nun has to be horrified by her brother's lust, because she can't acknowledge her own. Personally, I found it offensive that the nun's black female students are stereotyped as weak-willed, promiscuous, and childish, with a streak of savagery just under the surface. I also resented the way the brother's crude behavior has to be linked to the Beatnik poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
Allen Ginsberg?
Mary Gordon rats him out by name. But she doesn’t quote any of his poetry.
Well, dig this. Allen Ginsberg was gay. I mean, really gay. Poets like Lord Byron wrote about seducing and ruining innocent girls for centuries. But read HOWL and the only lover the poet seems to want is a guy named Carl Solomon. So what gives? I racked my brains for weeks trying to figure out why Mary Gordon has to make up weird lies and slander some poor dead queer Jew who never did any harm to anyone. Finally I uncovered the answer. Dean Martin.
Dean Martin?
That's right, Dean Martin. You see, the oafish brother in "Blind Spot" is always talking about women like they're pigs, tramps, cheap gold-diggers, broads he can use and throw away. His attitude is very Fifties, so Mary Gordon is right about that much. But it's not the Fifties of Allen Ginsberg, it's the Fifties of Sinatra's Rat Pack. So why must this tough, brilliant feminist author slander a harmless poet like Allen Ginsberg? Who or what is she really covering for?
I once read that when Dean Martin was through with a broad, he didn't like talking. One time a Vegas showgirl started talking to him in bed, and Dino supposedly snapped, "Listen, doll, if you want to talk, go to a priest." Now I’ll concede that men of all races and religions treat women badly. But Mary Gordon just can't face the fact that the men in her world who treat women badly have been trained to disrespect them by a church that worships virgins and demonizes all other women as whores. Mary Gordon can't solve that problem because she's part of it. She hates whores too, just like Dino. And her hatred is all the more violent because so much of it is directed inward.
When the sweet nun in "Blind Spot" finds out her brother has slept with a young woman on campus, her only response is rage and the urge to blame someone else. She can't acknowledge her brother's lust, because that would mean acknowledging her own. Someone else has to suffer. An outsider must be punished for the sins of the chosen group. Yesterday it was Andy Warhol. Today it's Allen Ginsberg. In the Civil War it was the blacks.
Who will it be tomorrow, Mary Gordon? Who will it be tomorrow?
In stories like "Violation" and "Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year" Mary Gordon assaults the reader with sledgehammer blows, shattering the illusion that sex, tenderness and love are always connected. Rape is my reality, the victim/narrator all but screams at the conclusion of "Violation." Rape, rape, rape, rape! Like Malcolm X raining down curses on white America from a Harlem street corner, Mary Gordon uses her heroine's victim status like a club, forcing the oppressor to face the hatred of the oppressed. Her feminism is not just a call for justice but a scream of vengeance. The fury that drives the sexually damaged women in her greatest stories transcends resentment or bitterness. It's an Ahab-like unquenchable hatred that encompasses all men, all sexual activity, and ultimately all nature and all physical existence.
There's an undeniable exhilaration to reading those brain-battering early stories, written without compromise by an author who was willing to state the most horrifying truths imaginable in the bluntest terms. In the old days Mary Gordon took no prisoners. She told the truth (some of it, anyway) and she wrote with bone-breaking (not to say ball-breaking) force.
Now regrettably, all things human are subject to decay. And when fate summons, monarchs must obey. In her old age, Mary Gordon has grown soft and sentimental, straining to find a vision of virginity triumphant in a modern, vulgar, frighteningly democratic world of racial equality and dirty male desire. But there's a worm in the apple. Mary Gordon can dismiss male desire easily enough, but at the end of the day it's female desire she can't forgive, or even acknowledge. In the old days she could reject temptation and vomit out desire in a draft-riot style paroxysm of rage, the way that crazy old bat throws Bobby Kennedy's statue out the window in "Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year."
But in the new stories, Mary Gordon lets her heroines have it both ways. In "Eleanor's Music," sweet little old Eleanor runs an amateur choir group that sings banal, inoffensive Christmas carols every year, until a drooling homosexual deviant forces them to sing a sex opera about the life of Andy Warhol! (I am not making this up.) Eleanor's virginity remains intact to the end, however, thanks to the fact that her ex-husband was really gay all along. Thank goodness! Evidently Mary Gordon doesn't realize that there are plenty of gay men around who swing both ways and father children. (Just ask King James I of England.) She also doesn't bother to explain why Eleanor's fake marriage is so much more gratifying for all concerned than a real one. The supposed dirtiness and potential violence of sex is no longer written in lightning bolts, it's just sort of lazily assumed. Sentimentality takes the place of savage indignation.
In "The Deacon" a nun named Sister Joan runs a Catholic school in New York City. She's supposedly an effective teacher, a superb disciplinarian, a powerful bad-ass (Mary Gordon loves bad-ass women) but you never actually see her teach her students, or confront their history, or anything like that. (I would have loved to see her teach a lesson on those nasty Draft Riots, especially on why the Catholic Church loves black kids today but was quite literally willing to leave them hanging during the Civil War.) Anyway, tough old Sister Joan is a chain-smoker, and it's astonishing how Mary Gordon makes a sexual fetish out of cigarette smoking, like it proves Sister Joan is a real woman after all. The same applies to her fondness for red meat and alcohol, and the films of W.C. Fields. This stuff is supposed to be charming, but I wasn't convinced. What really comes across is desperate sentimentality, straining to disguise itself as tough-minded realism.
The guilt-driven nun-worship resurfaces in "Blind Spot," where yet another feisty and charming nun pops up out of nowhere and revitalizes a dying Catholic college in the Midwest, only to be foiled by -- you guessed it -- the corrupting horror of villainous male lust. In this case it's the nun's brother, a crude lout who calls himself a Beatnik and poses as an art teacher, who brings the castle of illusions crashing down. Presumably the nun has to be horrified by her brother's lust, because she can't acknowledge her own. Personally, I found it offensive that the nun's black female students are stereotyped as weak-willed, promiscuous, and childish, with a streak of savagery just under the surface. I also resented the way the brother's crude behavior has to be linked to the Beatnik poetry of Allen Ginsberg.
Allen Ginsberg?
Mary Gordon rats him out by name. But she doesn’t quote any of his poetry.
Well, dig this. Allen Ginsberg was gay. I mean, really gay. Poets like Lord Byron wrote about seducing and ruining innocent girls for centuries. But read HOWL and the only lover the poet seems to want is a guy named Carl Solomon. So what gives? I racked my brains for weeks trying to figure out why Mary Gordon has to make up weird lies and slander some poor dead queer Jew who never did any harm to anyone. Finally I uncovered the answer. Dean Martin.
Dean Martin?
That's right, Dean Martin. You see, the oafish brother in "Blind Spot" is always talking about women like they're pigs, tramps, cheap gold-diggers, broads he can use and throw away. His attitude is very Fifties, so Mary Gordon is right about that much. But it's not the Fifties of Allen Ginsberg, it's the Fifties of Sinatra's Rat Pack. So why must this tough, brilliant feminist author slander a harmless poet like Allen Ginsberg? Who or what is she really covering for?
I once read that when Dean Martin was through with a broad, he didn't like talking. One time a Vegas showgirl started talking to him in bed, and Dino supposedly snapped, "Listen, doll, if you want to talk, go to a priest." Now I’ll concede that men of all races and religions treat women badly. But Mary Gordon just can't face the fact that the men in her world who treat women badly have been trained to disrespect them by a church that worships virgins and demonizes all other women as whores. Mary Gordon can't solve that problem because she's part of it. She hates whores too, just like Dino. And her hatred is all the more violent because so much of it is directed inward.
When the sweet nun in "Blind Spot" finds out her brother has slept with a young woman on campus, her only response is rage and the urge to blame someone else. She can't acknowledge her brother's lust, because that would mean acknowledging her own. Someone else has to suffer. An outsider must be punished for the sins of the chosen group. Yesterday it was Andy Warhol. Today it's Allen Ginsberg. In the Civil War it was the blacks.
Who will it be tomorrow, Mary Gordon? Who will it be tomorrow?
July 27, 2014
I loved this book. I liked every single one of the stories, and absolutely loved some of them. This is another example of the kind of short stories I aspire to write.
Gordon repeats some themes over several stories, but the stories never seem repetitive because the characters and situations she presents are so varied. She touches a lot on the theme of people who externalize anything that might qualify as a shadow: our flaws, our fears, our feelings of inadequacy or inappropriateness, the certainty of death.
I also like that she treats people of faith very matter-of-factly. One of my frustrations with late 20th and early 21st century fiction is that it either ignores faith or deals with it inadequately. People of faith are portrayed as naive or hypocritical, or you get the other extreme of Christian fiction, which oversimplifies every human problem as being rooted in rejection of Jesus. In fact, the existence and nature of God is the most important human topic, in my opinion, and ought to be dealt with in fiction more intelligently. In a couple of these stories, Gordon writes about modern nuns and lets their faith inform their choices without removing their agency and making their choices too simplistic. She doesn't really grapple with issues of faith, but she does weave it naturally into some of her stories, and I liked that.
Gordon repeats some themes over several stories, but the stories never seem repetitive because the characters and situations she presents are so varied. She touches a lot on the theme of people who externalize anything that might qualify as a shadow: our flaws, our fears, our feelings of inadequacy or inappropriateness, the certainty of death.
I also like that she treats people of faith very matter-of-factly. One of my frustrations with late 20th and early 21st century fiction is that it either ignores faith or deals with it inadequately. People of faith are portrayed as naive or hypocritical, or you get the other extreme of Christian fiction, which oversimplifies every human problem as being rooted in rejection of Jesus. In fact, the existence and nature of God is the most important human topic, in my opinion, and ought to be dealt with in fiction more intelligently. In a couple of these stories, Gordon writes about modern nuns and lets their faith inform their choices without removing their agency and making their choices too simplistic. She doesn't really grapple with issues of faith, but she does weave it naturally into some of her stories, and I liked that.
May 5, 2011
Almost finished this mammoth volume but not quite; ran out of renews at the library; but I greedily read as many stories as I could. My favorites: "Intertextuality," "Death in Naples," "The Epiphany Branch" from the new stories; "Temporary Shelter" from her earlier work. Such nuance, such care for texture (her attention to the wallpaper, for instance, reminds me of Vulliard's love for patterns -- one of Mike's favorite painters lately); such a quickly & fully created material world in her stories.
Gordon is no doubt a master, so my low-ish star rating has more to do with the reading experience of reading these stories back to back. She conveys a suspicion of all motives, especially those of do-gooders or people in helping professions -- much like Alice Munro, and with a similar worldly-wise feeling, but without the same love, or warmth; the underbelly of good works is such a vital theme, but it felt a little heavy-handed after awhile; also as in Munro's stories, there's the taboo of being a not-good girl -- a theme I love. Gordon's stories deal a lot with emotion, and writes it well, so the lack of warmth for me may be the NYC terrain (versus small town Ontario in Munro).
I might prefer Gordon in longer form; gives me time to care more and care as much as she demands that I care.
A section that struck me hard & bright:
"I don't know why I wasn't frightened of Mrs. Lynch; I was the sort of child to whom the slightest sign of irregularity might seem a menace. Now I can place her, having seen drawings by Hogarth, having learned words like harridan and slattern, which almost rhyme, having recorded, in the necessary course of feminist research, all those hateful descriptions of women gone to seed, or worse than seed, gone to some rank uncontrollable state where things sprouted and hung from them in a damp, lightless anarchy."
(317, from "The Neighborhood")
Gordon is no doubt a master, so my low-ish star rating has more to do with the reading experience of reading these stories back to back. She conveys a suspicion of all motives, especially those of do-gooders or people in helping professions -- much like Alice Munro, and with a similar worldly-wise feeling, but without the same love, or warmth; the underbelly of good works is such a vital theme, but it felt a little heavy-handed after awhile; also as in Munro's stories, there's the taboo of being a not-good girl -- a theme I love. Gordon's stories deal a lot with emotion, and writes it well, so the lack of warmth for me may be the NYC terrain (versus small town Ontario in Munro).
I might prefer Gordon in longer form; gives me time to care more and care as much as she demands that I care.
A section that struck me hard & bright:
"I don't know why I wasn't frightened of Mrs. Lynch; I was the sort of child to whom the slightest sign of irregularity might seem a menace. Now I can place her, having seen drawings by Hogarth, having learned words like harridan and slattern, which almost rhyme, having recorded, in the necessary course of feminist research, all those hateful descriptions of women gone to seed, or worse than seed, gone to some rank uncontrollable state where things sprouted and hung from them in a damp, lightless anarchy."
(317, from "The Neighborhood")
July 30, 2011
Mary Gordon’s stories deal with the travails of modern life – of individuals who grapple with the business of family, marriage, and identity.
Her protagonists are mostly women, Irish American, newly-displaced and carving a new identity at various stages of realising or witnessing and coming to terms with their American Dream falling to pieces, having a second go at their marriages, being disappointed with their children, etc.
Some characters that stand out for me include the well-meaning elderly widow who tries to cheerfully face the increasing irrelevance of her existence in ‘Death in Naples’, the efficient nun and principal who tolerates an incompetent teacher and find herself mistakenly playing out the role of friend and supporter despite her less noble intentions in ‘The Deacon’, and the long-suffering husband who holds onto a promise he made to his demented wife, despite his inability to cope with her deterioration in ‘Mrs Cassidy’s Last Year’.
Always graceful and written in careful, delicate strokes, Gordon’s stories will touch those that celebrate the honest and the frail but frustrate the cynical and those impatient with evidence of human weakness.
Her protagonists are mostly women, Irish American, newly-displaced and carving a new identity at various stages of realising or witnessing and coming to terms with their American Dream falling to pieces, having a second go at their marriages, being disappointed with their children, etc.
Some characters that stand out for me include the well-meaning elderly widow who tries to cheerfully face the increasing irrelevance of her existence in ‘Death in Naples’, the efficient nun and principal who tolerates an incompetent teacher and find herself mistakenly playing out the role of friend and supporter despite her less noble intentions in ‘The Deacon’, and the long-suffering husband who holds onto a promise he made to his demented wife, despite his inability to cope with her deterioration in ‘Mrs Cassidy’s Last Year’.
Always graceful and written in careful, delicate strokes, Gordon’s stories will touch those that celebrate the honest and the frail but frustrate the cynical and those impatient with evidence of human weakness.
July 6, 2007
She's a great writer, but the stories are a bit dark--not what I need right now (or ever! who does?). She is a fine writer though. The other thing is that there are many stories in the book--it was taking days to get through.
July 23, 2007
I loved her dark stories. My favorite was the one about the woman who grew up in a dirty home and tries to hang out with her filthy neighbor after she's moved out.
December 30, 2011
Mary Gordon's prose is so precise and elegant, Her characters so deftly drawn, her stories are a pleasure to read, even though they tend to end on a depressing note.
January 28, 2018
The ones that I liked I really, really liked:
*The Deacon
*Bishop's House
*The Epiphany Branch, narrated hilariously by a self-righteous library patron
*The Baby (my favorite), about the perils of mixing your friends and family
*Sick in London, about seeing things differently than your spouse
*Conversations in Prosperity, about the fear of being incapable of love
*The Deacon
*Bishop's House
*The Epiphany Branch, narrated hilariously by a self-righteous library patron
*The Baby (my favorite), about the perils of mixing your friends and family
*Sick in London, about seeing things differently than your spouse
*Conversations in Prosperity, about the fear of being incapable of love
June 3, 2018
these stories are so incisive, so frighteningly close to my heart
they're sad, and intense, and full of people who don't know how to cope
and i couldn't really read 400 pages of that, so i read the first 3/4 and then gave up the ghost
they're sad, and intense, and full of people who don't know how to cope
and i couldn't really read 400 pages of that, so i read the first 3/4 and then gave up the ghost
February 5, 2017
Thought provoking stories of life and living. Enjoy Gordon's writing style, her use of the everyday everyman/woman to walk the reader through life's phases. So good and intense!
October 24, 2020
Read this years ago....by one of my favorite authors
May 5, 2024
Wonderful writing. Some magnificent stories. Others good but not as geipping.
May 27, 2010
wow this book was amazing. there were s many stories that were completely different from one another. my favorite story was called Separation. It was really sad. It was about a mother who realizes her kid is growing up and she knows he will be gone before she can blink twice. she doesn't want him to go but she knows he will be gone soon and there will be nothing she can do about it.
this story is like many parents stories. their kids grow up really fast even when they don't want them to. A lot of people have said to me "it was only yesterday that you were running around in dippers". this story is about that. its about a mothers baby fading before her own eyes. she doesn't want him to be gone but he slowly is leaving her.
in the story, the mother and child only found peace with each other. the little boy didn't get along with any of the other children and mother felt like she wasn't supposed to be there when she was around the other mothers at her kids daycare. they only felt happy around each other.
this also shows how hard it is to get people to accept you for who you really are. the main family wasn't as wealthy as the other families at the daycare. this shows how class matters to people and how upper class people prefer to be around other upper class people and how middle class people prefer to be around other middle class people and lastly how lower class people prefer to be around lower class people.
in a way, this story reminded me of Nikkie and Micha. there wasn't a man around in either of their families when there should have been, and they both had big bumps in their roads to becoming a happy well supported family. its kind of hard to explain how their families are alike but its easy to understand when you read the story. this was only one of the amazing stories in the stories of mary gordon.
this story is like many parents stories. their kids grow up really fast even when they don't want them to. A lot of people have said to me "it was only yesterday that you were running around in dippers". this story is about that. its about a mothers baby fading before her own eyes. she doesn't want him to be gone but he slowly is leaving her.
in the story, the mother and child only found peace with each other. the little boy didn't get along with any of the other children and mother felt like she wasn't supposed to be there when she was around the other mothers at her kids daycare. they only felt happy around each other.
this also shows how hard it is to get people to accept you for who you really are. the main family wasn't as wealthy as the other families at the daycare. this shows how class matters to people and how upper class people prefer to be around other upper class people and how middle class people prefer to be around other middle class people and lastly how lower class people prefer to be around lower class people.
in a way, this story reminded me of Nikkie and Micha. there wasn't a man around in either of their families when there should have been, and they both had big bumps in their roads to becoming a happy well supported family. its kind of hard to explain how their families are alike but its easy to understand when you read the story. this was only one of the amazing stories in the stories of mary gordon.
April 18, 2009
Individually, these stories are brilliant gems. Each narrative character yearns for a sense of wholeness but is tainted in some surprising/horrific/human/unexpected way and cannot deal properly with the disappointments of life. Each story is a well realized and complex little vignette, showing family relationships and interpersonal dynamics from different perspectives and with a nice sense of completeness. This is particularly well done in the shortest of them, some of which were only a few pages long. Some stories also link back to each other, with different characters taking a starring role. As a rule, I love that. However, I found that some of the stories kind of ran together for me too much, and so when I would come across a recurring character it was a struggle to recollect what that character had been like in a previous story. (That may be due to the fact that I am feeling fairly stressed lately and have not been reading with as much attention as I ought.) As a group they seem to reveal the fragility of human connections and to declare that no family bond will ever be strong enough to save the individual from personal ruin. This is shown in a variety of familial constructs--sister to sister, mother to daughter, husband to wife, bosom friend to bosom friend, deacon to nun. Over and over these characters fail each other. They fail to recognize the essential nature of the lover/beloved and therefore fail to honor that nature and then all falls to shambles. It is perhaps not the best time for me to have read this book. I found it beautiful, intriguing, frightening, and depressing.
January 25, 2011
Mary Gordon's stories deal with the travails of modern life - of individuals who grapple with the business of family, marriage, and identity.
Her protagonists are mostly women, Irish American, newly-displaced and carving a new identity at various stages of realising or witnessing and coming to terms with their American Dream falling to pieces, having a second go at their marriages, being disappointed with their children, etc.
Some characters that stand out for me include the well-meaning elderly widow who tries to cheerfully face the increasing irrelevance of her existence in `Death in Naples', the efficient nun and principal who tolerates an incompetent teacher and find herself mistakenly playing out the role of friend and supporter despite her less noble intentions in `The Deacon', and the long-suffering husband who holds onto a promise he made to his demented wife, despite his inability to cope with her deterioration in `Mrs Cassidy's Last Year'.
Always graceful and written in careful, delicate strokes, Gordon's stories will touch those that celebrate the honest and the frail but frustrate the cynical and those impatient with evidence of human weakness.
Her protagonists are mostly women, Irish American, newly-displaced and carving a new identity at various stages of realising or witnessing and coming to terms with their American Dream falling to pieces, having a second go at their marriages, being disappointed with their children, etc.
Some characters that stand out for me include the well-meaning elderly widow who tries to cheerfully face the increasing irrelevance of her existence in `Death in Naples', the efficient nun and principal who tolerates an incompetent teacher and find herself mistakenly playing out the role of friend and supporter despite her less noble intentions in `The Deacon', and the long-suffering husband who holds onto a promise he made to his demented wife, despite his inability to cope with her deterioration in `Mrs Cassidy's Last Year'.
Always graceful and written in careful, delicate strokes, Gordon's stories will touch those that celebrate the honest and the frail but frustrate the cynical and those impatient with evidence of human weakness.
April 2, 2013
I came to love this long collection of many stories the more I read of it, in part because of the way in which the stories emerge from a single, ongoing habit of interrogation, an interrogation not only into human beings and their behaviors but into the act itself of writing about them... and in part, too, because of Gordon's vivid investment in the portraiture of an era (U.S.urban latter half of 20th century) and of a demographic (women, urban, left wing intellectuals not always so happy with the choices they've made, and eager to reckon with them.) The density of the prose is reflective of, and entirely organic to, the twists and turns made by the narrators' or protagonists' mixture of doubt and assertion; there is reciprocity between the syntax and the thought,in other words - one begets the other. I also like the feminist perspective and the paradox between it and the social realities at work in the stories. These are not high drama stories; the action is in the tension and release of the moment at hand
March 31, 2008
I read the first half of this book (Mary Gordon's unpublished stories) in October while I was living with my kids at my parents house (our house was being renovated). It was the perfect tone for a rather focused time. I put it aside when I reached the second half - her republished "Temporary Shelters" - I put it aside until just this week. When I picked it up this week the remainder of the book was a surprisingly quick read. I was glad I read this collection of stories but I did wish, by the end, for a few more grace notes. There was much I identified with with respect to the various women (despite note being either East coast or Catholic) - the first story of the collection included - but she often side steps those day to day events that can make living occasionally joyful.
December 18, 2011
Я не дочитала страниц пятьдесят до конца. Нельзя сказать, что бросила, потому что это отдельные новеллы.
Мне понравился стиль, и новеллы я люблю, но что-то с ними не так.
Зачин всегда интересный. И персонажей видишь сразу, хоть всего несколькими штрихами они написаны, и есть предчувствие сюжета.
Но вот концовки для меня непонятны - хочешь, называй это импрессионизмом в литературе, а хочешь, говори, что cela finit en eau de boudin.
Чтение вышло медленное - не потому что вкушаешь, а потому что решаешь, что лучше уж поспать. И не такая уж толстая книжка, чтобы мусолить две недели и так и не дочитать...
Мне понравился стиль, и новеллы я люблю, но что-то с ними не так.
Зачин всегда интересный. И персонажей видишь сразу, хоть всего несколькими штрихами они написаны, и есть предчувствие сюжета.
Но вот концовки для меня непонятны - хочешь, называй это импрессионизмом в литературе, а хочешь, говори, что cela finit en eau de boudin.
Чтение вышло медленное - не потому что вкушаешь, а потому что решаешь, что лучше уж поспать. И не такая уж толстая книжка, чтобы мусолить две недели и так и не дочитать...
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June 2, 2015Forty-one stories with, I felt, only one central character or pov. This is not empirically true, but rather how I experienced the stories, although to be sure, there is a very consistent pov even if it's not as narrow as just one throughout all 41 stories. My purpose in focussing on this aspect of my reading experience is to explain how little I enjoyed the collection. I didn't like her "Catholic heterosexual mother/wife born in the 1940s". I didn't like her 41 times. I did finish the collection though, for the plots I suppose. The storytelling is crafty enough to carry one through 41 stories of one disliked character, so full props there.
October 11, 2015
Most of these short stories are poignant and delve into sometimes uncomfortable topics. Gordon has an amazing vocabulary and you quickly get wrapped up in her characters, despite the brevity of each story.
November 13, 2015
I am convinced that Mary Gordon and Lydia Davis share some cosmic talents. Within these 400 pages, I had to, at time, remind myself that I wasn't reading a Davis book. Both writers write about oboes (What's with that?). Gordon's book is filled with subtle wit and intriguing situations.
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June 20, 2007i always end up loving mary gordon's stories about lonely, old women; my favorites are "the epiphany branch" and "death in naples."
May 19, 2008
I like Mary Gordon, I guess I don't know if I like her, I like her writing.
August 27, 2010
So far I love it -
the stories are well written and very short. Sometimes I can read one a day. Each one is different.
I am not done with the book yet, but so far I like it a lot.
the stories are well written and very short. Sometimes I can read one a day. Each one is different.
I am not done with the book yet, but so far I like it a lot.
October 17, 2011
i heart mary gordon.
August 7, 2016
This is an interesting collection of short stories that are intriguing and explore many charters.
May 22, 2010
Okay, actually a 2.5.
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