The Other Side:

...The second made him frightened: he could see the remnants of life still within the animal...

...Having alienated their daughters and lost their son in World War II, Ellen and Vincent attempt to recoup their losses through these two grandchildren whom they raise as their own...

...He is on his way to his wife...

...The dark strain in the McNamara family romance flows in an appropriately Freudian way from a sibling rivalry that sours Vincent's growing up and from a maternal breakdown that destroys Ellen's idyllic childhood and breeds an undying hatred of her ambitious father for abandoning his wife...

...The blight they carried with them from the other side infects in one form or another all three of their children and most of the next two generations...

...In the end, Vincent and Ellen are alone together, more passionate and committed than any of their clan...

...What are we to make of this world of the McNamaras that Mary Gordon has created...

...More seriously, the large cast dissipates both the narrative flow and the dramatic tension of the novel...

...The narrative shuttles from consciousness to consciousness with names being dropped in an entirely familial way, requiring many flips back to the list of dramatis personae...

...Too many of the clan are more caricatures than characters, each with a special grudge or a special tic, like daughter Theresa's deadly combination of punishing remarks and charismatic prayers or grandson John's general ineffectualness...

...Surely, it is an interesting one, especially in the persons of its matriarch and patriarch...

...I found that judgment confirmed when, at a reading I attended, she chose to read exclusively from these sections...

...The Other Side covers one day in the life of the McNamara family, four generations of New York Irish-Americans who have most of the vices and some of the virtues of their kind...

...It is not a happy family that gathers around Ellen to await Vincent's fulfillment of a vow she had extracted from him early in their marriage that he would never abandon her to an institution...

...Surprisingly, for Ellen and Vincent, their marriage, tumultuous as its six decades prove to be, offers each the confidence and love they have lacked...

...When Vincent finally does return on the last page of the novel, he confirms what the story has already made abundantly clear: "He walks through the living room, waving his hand at people, like a politician...

...After such wounding, what healing...

...The bad news is that the execution isn't quite as good as the idea...

...John B. Breslin The blight in their baggage Mary Gordon's latest novel is also her most ambitious both in length and, more importantly, in scope...

...But the story of Ellen and Vincent has its roots in Ireland, the most obvious but not the only sense of the novel's evocative title...

...The first thing he took in with calm...

...To soil it with her filth...

...Vincent and Ellen dominate not only their family but Mary Gordon's novel as well, and both to questionable effect...

...In a Queens bedroom, the ninety-year-old matriarch, Ellen, lies angrily dying while a hundred miles east in a warmly lit nursing home her husband Vincent reluctantly waits to be brought back to her...

...The tangle of their love, as expressed in their own ruminations and in the deeply biased reflections of their progeny, confirms Tolstoy's observation about the uniqueness of unhappy families...

...That's the good news about the novel, and it is indeed good...

...Together they stand against their cousins and their aunts, intent on protecting Ellen and Vincent from their indifference and resentment...

...And this from Vincent's recollection of his older brother's vicious killing of a pet lamb in a scene redolent of the Book of Genesis: "While Vincent looked down at the animal's body, he knew everything...

...To punish him for leaving them alone in the stone house with only two windows, for allowing Marin Monahan in the house that had been once her mother's...

...He'd made the mother darken, coarsen, till she looked out at the brown grasses from the moment of her awakening until dark, her only pleasure food, eaten fearfully, and greedily, like an animal...

...Her mother, once beautiful, now ruined, was her father's work...

...What happened had just happened...

...It was Vincent's throat, not the poor animal's, he would have liked to cut...

...He has no time for them now...

...He waves at his children, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren...

...They also come to be partners in a local law firm specializing in divorce, a condition each knows intimately...

...Of all their descendants unto the third generation only Cam and Dan are presented as attractive individuals...

...The long passage of retrospect that limn their troubled departures from home reveal Gordon at her narrative and psychological best...

...it was simple: the animal was dead...

...His brother had done this to harm him...

...Here's a sample taken from Ellen's memories of her father's infidelity: "But it was her job to hate her father...

...The third thing he knew made fear and anger grow inside his brain, like trees that grow from the same root beside each other, harmful and competitive, yet bound...

...But that day extends backward over eight decades, and the novel's focus moves from the new world to the old and back...

...Indeed, it is the only successful marriage in the whole novel...

...He believes that she can see him, but he's not quite sure...

...In spite of these disappointments, I for one look forward eagerly (not anxiously) to Mary Gordon's next novel which I trust will be as daring in its way as The Other Side...

...Ellen's indifference toward her daughters is richly repaid by their hostility, just as her devotion to her son John is recompensed in the way of Irish fatalism with his death in battle...

...Cousins who become siblings, Cam and Dan inherit both Ellen's fierce determination to change the world and Vincent's calmer acceptance of life's anomalies...

...In setting out to do Tolstoy in Queens, Mary Gordon has taken as many risks as her heroine...

...The protracted accounts of their unhappiness become tedious after a while, and the reader longs for the sharper passions of Ellen and Vincent which give the novel the genuine power it has...

...If the list of family members and their interrelationships that prefaces the novel is a form of homage to her Russian models, it also should forewarn readers that exposition will be in short supply...

...In the meantime, their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren gather in Queens to await the reunion and live out the grudges, resentments, and affections that have grown up across the generations...

...All the rest, even Cam and Dan, fade into insignificance in the final ambiguous flaring of their lifelong love that closes the book: "She hears his step in the room and opens up her eyes...