A Telling ‘Other Side’ of the Irish

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.

Having flown in from New York the night before, she was trying to pull herself together for the day’s interviews. So far, she wasn’t having much luck. Clothes were strewn across both beds, she was still without shoes and, on top of that, she had jet lag. “I just find plane rides poisonous,” she confided, blowing her nose and dabbing at her large brown eyes with a Kleenex, “even though I do all the right things.”

Gordon, who lives with her husband, writer Arthur Cash, and their two children in Upstate New York, leads a domestic life. She didn’t like the disruption the tour caused in her daily routine, and she particularly missed her children, Anna, 9, and David, 6. A press bio notes that she considers the children’s births among “most important events” of her 40-some years. “It’s very displacing to go on tour,” said Gordon, a small, nervous woman. “The fact I’ve been away from my writing and my children is very disorienting.” Which makes reading “The Other Side”--a primer on bad motherhood and the evils of traditional family life--all the more jarring.

Reviewers have praised Gordon’s writing and the depth of her characters. “Final Payments” in 1978 was called “not merely ‘promising’ as so many first novels are, but polished, finished, complete.” In its review of her second novel, “The Company of Women,” in 1981, the Los Angeles Times placed Gordon “on the verge of moving into the company of writers such as William Golding, Bernard Malamud, Walker Percy and Samuel Beckett--the foremost moral novelists of our day.”

“A fine, full-bodied book, the author’s most ambitious yet,” said the New York Times review of “The Other Side,” which is Gordon’s fourth novel. (The third was “Men and Angels” in 1985.) “Gordon brilliantly delineates a tangled web of personal relationships,” said the Chicago Sun Times of her new book. But some have been put off by the book’s bleak narrative. “Remains a confusing novel, grim and relentless . . . more diatribe than explanation,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer concluded.

It may be hard for readers not to agree. Set in turn-of-the-century Ireland and modern-day Queens, the novel chronicles the tortured history of the MacNamara family over almost 100 years. But more than that, it’s a disturbing look at Irish-American immigrants, some of their more destructive traits, and how those are passed from one generation to the next.

The central character, Ellen, fled Ireland at 17 for America after watching her father drive her mother crazy. As an adult, she has become an angry, frustrated housewife who has nothing but contempt for her daughters, Magdalene and Theresa. “Three causes--Roosevelt, the unions and the war--” wrote Gordon, “took up the love Ellen should have given to her daughters, whom she saw as torpid, truculent and weak.” In response, Magdalene has become an agoraphobic alcoholic who hasn’t left her house in 15 years, and is estranged from her daughter Cam. And Theresa has become a vengeful witch. “Caught up in her hatred; she loved its function: to do hurt.”

Theresa feels so bitter toward Ellen that she’d like nothing better than to put her in a nursing home. Her own three children, in turn, hate her, and their personal lives are a shambles. Son John is a wasted Vietnam vet, daughter Sheilah is an ex-nun married to an ex-priest, and daughter Marilyn is a three-time divorcee.

It would be tough to imagine a more spiteful, disagreeable family than the one Gordon imposes on us. But then Gordon’s own experience wasn’t all that different. “I don’t like to generalize about families,” she said. “But I guess I have seen in a certain critical mass of Irish women--because they tend to be hyper-responsible and discouraged from expressing themselves or getting ahead--a huge amount of frustration and anger. And I feel like that kind of frustration and anger around children is very dangerous.”

Like the MacNamaras, Gordon was reared in a combative, highly critical Irish Catholic family. Her grandmother was a strong, capable woman who immigrated to America from Ireland as a teen-ager and who strongly influenced her children and grandchildren. And though Gordon is close to her mother, one cousin and one aunt, she said, she has a terrible relationship with her other relatives.

So terrible, in fact, that she felt compelled to reveal her family’s low regard for her in the New York Times Review of Books last year, in a lengthy essay on the place of the writer in the Irish-American community. “Who could imagine a situation in which an attack was less expected, less appropriate?” she wrote, recalling an incident at a beloved uncle’s funeral, where she was weeping beside his coffin while holding her infant son. “Yet, one of my uncles chose this time to say to me: ‘I just want to tell you I can’t stand your books. None of us can.’ ”

“Well, it would have been easy . . . to say, ‘a prophet is always without honor in his own family,’ ” Gordon wrote on. “But who is with honor in my family? . . . The honored person in my family is my cousin the nun . . . She came up to me, after awhile, and took my hand. ‘Mary,’ she said. ‘I just feel I need to tell you that I think your books are dreadful.’ ”

“I think there’s a real streak of harshness in the Irish,” Gordon said, “and I think it’s because they had to work against very severe odds. They’ve been a colonized people, and they still don’t have it together.”

Despite the obvious parallels, Gordon insists that none of her characters were based on her relatives, and that the novel came out of her interest in examining immigration. “I know this sounds terribly elitist,” she said, “but I didn’t feel that the Irish had had their experience of immigration really explored in serious literature. We have had stories of Irish immigration, but not really about their inner life, what that displacement might feel like. That whole feeling of displacement really interested me.”

But what also motivated Gordon was offering a certain, uncensored version of family life. Although Gordon was an only child, her mother was from a family of nine, most of whom lived near her grandmother in an “Irish Catholic ghetto” on Long Island. “So I really grew up in an extended family. I can really explode the myth of how lovely extended families are. So wonderful, you just have the grandmothers and aunts and everybody pitches in. Everybody pitches in to kill each other. Nobody need ever be alone because they’re always being tortured.

“I was very interested in exploding the Reagan-Bush fantasy about family life, which is that if everybody would just shape up and move into their grandmother’s, everything would be fine.”

Not surprisingly, Gordon, who escaped home when she was 17 to attend college at Barnard, regards the current nostalgia for an older, more traditional way of life extremely disturbing. “The thing is, family life was built on women in positions of unpaid domestic servitude, and once you take that away, we haven’t figured out a replacement yet,” she says. “So I find this nostalgia very politically dangerous, and very dangerous to women. Because what people are nostalgic for is having an unpaid domestic servant.”

Gordon’s dismay doesn’t just stem from her feminist politics. In the novel, when Ellen first arrives in America she takes a job as a live-in servant to a wealthy Irish family--a situation that Gordon drew directly from in her research. “I learned a tremendous amount about the daily life of domestic workers, which was really horrifying,” she says. “I could never have anybody live in. To hear these women’s testimony of what it is like not to have any time that’s your own . . . “

In a departure from her exhaustive treatment of Catholicism and the politics of family life, Gordon plans to do something “very very different” with her next work, a series of novellas. Saying that she does not like to talk about writing in progress, Gordon would reveal only that the project will take two to three years and that one of the novellas is set in Italy in the 1930s. “It’s not my past,” said Gordon.

“It’s not the world people associate with the Mary Gordon world, and that’s a little scary,” she admitted. “I know there are a certain number of people who like me and feel sustained and comforted because I have written about a certain way of life which they identify with. But what I’m working on right now is not going to do that. I just want to say, follow me, trust me.”