Mary Gordon

IMAGINE fiction as a place -- a small, close wooden room with a kneeler and a screen. Imagine the writer entering that room and telling her stories to a man behind the screen. Then she gets up and leaves. Sometimes she feels better, lighter. Sometimes she feels false, as if it were all too easy, as if making literature out of people, problems and regrets were a kind of sin. Instead of being a way to find the truth, telling stories is just another form of lying.

The Love of My Youth A Novel Mary Gordon Pantheon: 308 pp., $25.95 How many of us at middle age yearn for the opportunity to reencounter a long-lost love? We show up at school reunions, searching for the ghost of romance past. Or perhaps we settle for a mutual "friending" on Facebook and a tepid e-mail or two. The protagonists of Mary Gordon's intermittently affecting new novel, "The Love of My Youth," are more fortunate: They play out their second-chance fantasy against the backdrop of Rome's baroque splendor — a setting that conjures such classic film romances as "Roman Holiday" and "Three Coins in the Fountain.

Mary Gordon calls her fifth novel, "Spending," "a utopian divertimento." I call it a lark, with more orgasms per page than anything I've read since "Portnoy's Complaint" or "A Sport and a Pastime"--but from the female point of view. In a nutshell, it's about sex and money and art, and it's filled with plenty of all three, but it's the sex that takes you by surprise. It's a departure for Gordon, who isn't exactly known for being light, never mind lusty.

"Sorry about your happy childhood," said a good, teasing father to his writer-wannabe daughter. Family trauma is often at the root of compelling literature. Children under duress frequently find solace in books, and young writers-in-the-making soon learn that channeling feelings and thoughts onto the page or screen staves off anguish, however briefly.

"Sorry about your happy childhood," said a good, teasing father to his writer-wannabe daughter. Family trauma is often at the root of compelling literature. Children under duress frequently find solace in books, and young writers-in-the-making soon learn that channeling feelings and thoughts onto the page or screen staves off anguish, however briefly.

"All this" is how a woman in "The Rest of Life" refers to what she's telling us, then adds, "By 'all this' I guess I mean how I have shaped my life." And this is very much what these three fine novellas are about: the shape of life, the place of a person in it, the continuity of a body and mind in time. Not stories in the traditional sense, they take the form of extended meditations.

Mary Gordon excavates four generations of a tormented Irish-American family in her new novel, and expounds upon them with a brilliance borne down by insistence. Gordon is a hostess who introduces people to us by telling us all about them. The introduction once made, she keeps on telling us about them. They hardly speak for themselves.

All of us, at some point in our lives, have been lied to by someone we love. The lie is not, of course, the worst part. The discovery of the lie is the worst part--that horrifying brainstem-meltdown moment when we realize that a person we trusted is not at all who we thought they were. If the lie is big enough, the shattering that begins with our heart soon reverberates until the entire universe is spider-webbed with fault-lines and fracture, like a windshield just after impact.

The critics aren't at all sure how to handle this one. Since her debut 20 years ago with "Final Payments," Mary Gordon, patron saint of American Irish Catholic angst, has been hailed as one of this country's finest writers. In return, she has dutifully produced three more lyrical novels--"The Company of Women," "Men and Angels," "The Other Side," and countless essays and short stories, revelations all of the tyrannies of love and death, family and faith.

Men and Angels by Mary Gordon (Random House: $16.95; 241 pp.) Whether art's deep purpose is to imitate life is one thing; but it is not to imitate the current received discourse about life, except by way of illustration or parody. There are genuine and engaging emotions in Mary Gordon's "Men and Angels," and the problem of a woman's balance between maternity and autonomy is real and fairly put. But the emotions and the problem lack hosts with voices that are precisely their own.

IMAGINE fiction as a place -- a small, close wooden room with a kneeler and a screen. Imagine the writer entering that room and telling her stories to a man behind the screen. Then she gets up and leaves. Sometimes she feels better, lighter. Sometimes she feels false, as if it were all too easy, as if making literature out of people, problems and regrets were a kind of sin. Instead of being a way to find the truth, telling stories is just another form of lying.

Her austerity demands a command of the facts, which Mary Gordon bows to. White doves and butterflies aside, she was a human, a girl, born in 1412 and burned to death in 1431. She had three brothers, was born into a peasant family in France and at 12 began hearing voices. The voices told her that she must crown the dauphin, Charles, king of France. At 17 she told her parents she was going to help a cousin give birth and never returned.

Mary Gordon calls her fifth novel, "Spending," "a utopian divertimento." I call it a lark, with more orgasms per page than anything I've read since "Portnoy's Complaint" or "A Sport and a Pastime"--but from the female point of view. In a nutshell, it's about sex and money and art, and it's filled with plenty of all three, but it's the sex that takes you by surprise. It's a departure for Gordon, who isn't exactly known for being light, never mind lusty.

The critics aren't at all sure how to handle this one. Since her debut 20 years ago with "Final Payments," Mary Gordon, patron saint of American Irish Catholic angst, has been hailed as one of this country's finest writers. In return, she has dutifully produced three more lyrical novels--"The Company of Women," "Men and Angels," "The Other Side," and countless essays and short stories, revelations all of the tyrannies of love and death, family and faith.

All of us, at some point in our lives, have been lied to by someone we love. The lie is not, of course, the worst part. The discovery of the lie is the worst part--that horrifying brainstem-meltdown moment when we realize that a person we trusted is not at all who we thought they were. If the lie is big enough, the shattering that begins with our heart soon reverberates until the entire universe is spider-webbed with fault-lines and fracture, like a windshield just after impact.

"All this" is how a woman in "The Rest of Life" refers to what she's telling us, then adds, "By 'all this' I guess I mean how I have shaped my life." And this is very much what these three fine novellas are about: the shape of life, the place of a person in it, the continuity of a body and mind in time. Not stories in the traditional sense, they take the form of extended meditations.

Mary Gordon, whose first novel, "Final Payments," made her a literary sensation at age 29, padded across a cramped hotel room overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. More than a decade after that first success, she'd just started a national tour for her latest book, "The Other Side," a sprawling saga detailing the lives of four generations of an Irish-American family published recently by Viking.

The Love of My Youth A Novel Mary Gordon Pantheon: 308 pp., $25.95 How many of us at middle age yearn for the opportunity to reencounter a long-lost love? We show up at school reunions, searching for the ghost of romance past. Or perhaps we settle for a mutual "friending" on Facebook and a tepid e-mail or two. The protagonists of Mary Gordon's intermittently affecting new novel, "The Love of My Youth," are more fortunate: They play out their second-chance fantasy against the backdrop of Rome's baroque splendor — a setting that conjures such classic film romances as "Roman Holiday" and "Three Coins in the Fountain.

Mary Gordon, whose first novel, "Final Payments," made her a literary sensation at age 29, padded across a cramped hotel room overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. More than a decade after that first success, she'd just started a national tour for her latest book, "The Other Side," a sprawling saga detailing the lives of four generations of an Irish-American family published recently by Viking.