AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--JUNE 2023--MARY GORDON

Mary Gordon was born to an Irish Catholic mother and a father who had converted from Judaism. Her early writing gave her a reputation as a feminist author, because so many of her female characters make troubled journeys from innocence to self-awareness and an ultimate sense of liberation. Embedded in those women’s stories was also a good deal of the guilt so deeply associated with being raised and educated in strong Catholic homes and schools, as the author was herself.

Gordon has not shied away from exploration of the dichotomy of faith vs. reason, although in her own mind she seems to find room for both concepts to flourish. Like Marilynne Robinson, who we featured in the AAC in 2019, Gordon takes the reader into territory where faith is challenged on many fronts, where the struggle for simple decency in a society with fewer and fewer moral restraints often seems unwinnable, where the questions have no pat answers. In a 2006 interview with Bill Moyers, Gordon described herself as a person of faith, but one who "wouldn’t like to be in a world where everybody was a believer and we all sort of fell back into this comfort zone of agreeing with each other all the time." She embraces a religious perspective, "because it seems to create a language that explains more things about human beings than other languages do, without answering it. But it raises the questions. It creates a vocabulary where more questions can be raised...as long as you give up the idea that it will answer the questions."

Her own life has given her some unanswerable questions. She discovered in mid-life that the father she lost at a very young age had completely fabricated his past, and was not "the greatest man on earth" as she had believed at the time of his death. Her mother died after suffering from Alzheimer’s, which taught Gordon "that all my love and my imagination and my effort were able to accomplish nothing for her. Nothing I did made anything any better. And that I had to love her as one of the living dead." She wrote about both experiences in memoirs entitled The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother.

Gordon received her B. A. from Barnard College, where she taught English and writing from 1988 until her retirement in 2020. She also studied at Syracuse University. Her second husband, Arthur Cash, was also a professor and an author, known for his biographies of Laurence Sterne and John Wilkes, and for his popular courses on the Old Testament as well as Greek and Roman literature at SUNY New Paltz. Gordon has been the recipient of various honors and awards, including being named one of the first inductees to the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, in an inaugural class with James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Langston Hughes and 7 others. Her most recent novels are There Your Heart Lies and Payback.

So glad I double check my touchstones and links before posting. Apparently my autocorrect felt that "Langston Hughes" should have been a fellow named "Flagstone Hughes".

>2 laytonwoman3rd: Yeah, those Touchstones and autocorrects are real comedians at times.

I will be reading Joan of Arc: A Life for this challenge. I was glad to see that my local library had several of Gordon's books from which to read.

I have the Joan of Arc: A Life too, so will fish that out.

Unfortunately, do not recommend SPENDING. Review is posted.

Oh dear. I just gave away my only Mary Gordon book, a copy of The Company of Women without reading it.

I'm Pearl-ruling Pearl. I don't care for the style, or the patronising, self-important authorial tone in the guise of an omniscient narrator who makes a point of deciding when to tell us what. Any desire I may have had to understand why a young American woman would chain herself to an embassy fence in Ireland, determined to die like Bobby Sands, to "bear witness" to something, has preceded her in death. (If she's actually going to die, which I doubt.) I think there's an excellent story in there somewhere, but Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston and Margaret Drabble to the contrary notwithstanding, I have yet to see a glimpse of the compassion, suspense or lyrical intensity they're on about; Gordon's habit of speaking directly to the reader, as if we're likely to miss the point but she's going to make it clear, makes me twitch; and I just don't have the patience to stick with it. Perhaps it's because I was not brought up to believe that voluntary suffering is its own reward?

I finished Joan of Arc yesterday. For someone like me who knew little of the life of the title lady, it made for interesting reading although I do have some reservations: yes, Joan was young, but I think Gordon harps on it a bit too much. Also, there was one chapter that felt more like padding - the one about Joan in the media (movies, books, plays, etc) than adding anything, but that is probably just a personal quibble on my part. I am not sorry I read it, but it is not a book to which I will return. I did like the chapter included on Joan's being elected a saint because as a non-Catholic, I had no idea what the procedure entailed.

I'm setting a new personal record in the AAC. This is the third DNF for me this year, and the second author I've abandoned completely based on one highly praised work I couldn't finish. I take consolation from reading the other reviews of Pearl on site; I find my gripes are not exclusive to me. I think the same may have been true of The Overstory. Ursula Hegi remains an author I may approach again.

>8 alcottacre: hmm Think I'll give it and her a miss then. I'd rather read a better biography of Josn.

I read Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels. I was a bit hesitant to read it but this was quite good. Not that I agree with her but that she was willing to do it. Everyone should do this rather than form opinions without knowing. I also liked how she pulled in literature into her experience of reading the Gospels. Mary Gordon's mother was Catholic and her father Jewish who converted to Catholic.

>11 Kristelh: I've been intrigued by the concept of this one too. I'm keeping it in the back of my mind for "someday". I've had trouble with her somewhat judgmental and self-important tone in other writings, though, and feared finding it in this type of project would destroy a perfectly good idea.

>12 laytonwoman3rd: Linda, yes it started out with some judgmental statements but then she went on to challenge herself. I didn't get too riled up when I read it.

I finished Home: What It Means and Why It Matters. Too much about the physical aspects and not much about the inhabitants. Also I rarely use privacy to maintain secrets, but I treasure it for the control I have over the mood of my space. A Room of Her Own is more than just to keep busybodies out of private business, it's to keep even the beloved ones away when they can't be dealt with or will interfere with needed work, personal or professional.

The July thread is up. We're reading U. S. Presidents (or their ghostwriters) this month.