A Comfortable Martyrdom

...The exploration of the nature of martyrdom and forgiveness takes center stage as the agenda of the book...

...Mary Gordon could have sent her anywhere...

...Another occasion when this kind of overrefined, entitled sensibility works is when Joseph and Maria are at dinner at a Dublin restaurant...

...And which side, you may wonder am I on...

...It is basically your standard model third person omniscient, with a couple of upgrades and twists...

...her spine thrilled when she heard the word...

...There is Joseph, the servant's son, cast forever in the role of supporting actor and protector, fated never to get top billing as the child's father...

...As for the one responsible for the child's "conception," he is a "ghost"—a Cambodian doctor and human rights activist called Ya-Katey (suggestive, in the Jewish tradition, of the YK of the divine ineffable name), who swoops into Maria's life around the time of the Feast of the Assumption and then vanishes forever...

...Let's talk about the worst martyrs we can imagine," Maria would entice Joseph when they were children...

...My daughter is not disturbed," Maria declares right off the bat to the State Department official who calls with the bad news, and everyone who surrounds Pearl, including the psychiatrist who cares for her in the hospital, seems to agree that this is a superior being, not just another troubled kid...

...At times it brightens the book, as when Maria, barred by a hospital apparatchik from meeting with Pearl's doctor, announces that she is going to scream until she gets what she wants, and then plants her feet firmly on the ground and proceeds with her tantrum, to great comic effect...

...Although Gordon never actually uses the pop phrase "healing process," that is what forgiveness essentially boils down to here—a kind of feel-good indulgence, religion as psychology...

...Through her public demise she also wants to highlight her support for the Irish Peace Agreement that promises to end the cycle of violence and suffering, at least in one place on the planet...

...The action of the novel, in case you have not yet gotten the message, is launched on Christmas night (1998...

...the story becomes, in Gordon's own words, "more a tone than a tale...

...Coyly implying a personal relationship to the characters beyond that of their chronicler/creator, this is a very present, in-your-face narrative voice...

...Her 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, on leave from Wesleyan to study Gaelic at Trinity College, has chained herself to the flagpole at the American Embassy...

...As for Pearl, great pains are taken to put you on notice to perish the thought that hers is a case of adolescent anorexia or suicidal despair...

...I want to tell Joseph that he's made a mistake," the narrator confides to you, "it's not the sanctuary of marriage, it's the sanctity...

...Having forgiven and sought forgiveness, she is now released to enter "the bog of loss and grieving...

...What's wrong with Yale...

...Gordon very quickly and efficiently puts into play the elements of her story: not only the holy trio, Maria, Joseph and Pearl, and not only some of the most dynamic centers of Catholic fervor, Rome, Ireland and implicitly Jerusalem (since Maria's father, like Gordon's in her memoir, The Shadow Man, is a convert from Judaism), but above all the emotionally fraught precipitating event—parents fighting to save the life of their child...

...As a child, Pearl had read about martyrs in her mother's Catholic schoolgirl books: "she'd discovered it secretly, on her own, as other children might discover the term sadist or coprophilia...

...he takes upon himself the penance of going into exile, of separating from the family to live in Rome...

...the narrator asks the reader when Pearl, now hospitalized, refuses to see her mother, and Joseph and Maria disagree about what to do next...

...The final pages of the novel are taken up with forgiveness and the related concepts of atonement, reparation, absolution, redemption...

...He is provoked to disgust by the slow-motion spectacle of her cutting and relishing her meat, then pushed beyond endurance when she orders him, like a servant, to get her some butter...

...It opens with one of those heart-stopping, nightmare telephone calls: The State Department is on the line advising Maria to take the next plane out of New York to Dublin...

...But not until she got involved in Dublin with a group of Irish Republican radicals, venerators of the hunger striker Bobby Sands, who died of starvation in prison in 1982, had the word "martyr" been spoken out loud in her presence...

...What do you think...

...Why, then, does the novel as it unfolds over the course of a few days to its expected happy ending (a Pietà close-up of sorts, with the variation that the child is a daughter and the daughter is alive) lack tension and urgency...

...Compounding this distancing perspective is the thematic overlay of the book...

...According to Pearl's own statement left on the ground beside her (and two personal letters, one for Maria and the other for Joseph), her objective is, in general terms, to bear witness to the human capacity to do harm, and specifically, to the harm she believes herself to have inflicted on a slow-witted boy, Stevie Donegan, which she is convinced led to his death...

...And, in a contemporary feminist twist, there is the holy child herself, Pearl (evoking Matthew's "pearl of great price"), symbol of martyrdom and witness, purity and forgiveness...

...During his meandering he comes up with his nutty idea that he has to marry Pearl to preserve her purity...

...The sensibility that emerges is comfortable, a bit smug and spoiled, middle class...

...I am on both sides...

...Why does it essentially leave the reader cold...

...Joseph, overcome by shame, by a sense that he has turned himself into a betrayer like Judas for his proposal of marriage to Pearl, which upsets the recovering girl dangerously, is forgiven by her...

...Or perhaps this: godfather, present at the christening...

...Maria forgives her dead father for his tyrannical protectiveness, for using his powerful connections to shield her from the consequences of her '60s radicalism, and asks forgiveness from him in turn for hardening her heart against him in his dying hour...

...you don't worry about what is going to happen to these people, and you are not too concerned...

...Summons" is the right word, because even though Joseph is, in a sense, Pearl's godfather, affording her and Maria a life of comfort and indulgence through the family business he manages, and even though Joseph clearly loves Pearl and would do anything for her, in his own eyes and in Maria's he is, and always will remain, a beneficiary, the beholden son of the Polish servant Maria's father hired to oversee his household and care for his twoyear-old motherless daughter...

...they're not convincing...

...But the consequence of her approach is that the reader's connection to the concrete, particular human predicament gives way under pressure from the weight of these heavy abstractions...

...This is how the voice introduces itself: "But who am I? you may be asking...

...she has not eaten for six weeks, and taken nothing to drink for six days...

...For this Catholic holy family, martyrdom is a highly seductive concept, a temptation that is just about irresistible...

...The overall effect is almost clinical...

...It stops the action again and again, insisting upon its prerogative to interpret, analyze and comment, coopting the reader to join in this enterprise every step of the way...

...These themes are present in Pearl, too, except here they effectively function as subheadings under two overarching religious categories, martyrdom and forgiveness...

...the narrator continues...

...I" the narrator in conference with "you" the reader are firmly planted in the foreground observing the characters acting out their little dramas in the background...

...From her debut novel, Final Payments, and onward, Gordon has always been a writer who has sought to understand the world and extract meaning through broad themes, usually of a domestic nature—family, father, feminism, faith...

...The surprising disconnect is brought about, first of all, because of the odd voice Gordon employs to narrate the story...

...This familiar contemporary formulation—in trendy parlance, giving oneself permission to do "the work of mourning"—is also invoked in some form by Pearl when Stevie Donegan's mother forgives her for whatever responsibility she might have forme boy's death...

...By far the major portion of the novel focuses on the theme of martyrdom, incorporating sacrifice, punishment, suffering, sainthood, purity, witness: "martyr means witness in Greek," Maria reminds herself...

...The characters are set in motion to illustrate and illuminate them, rather than the other way round...

...To save Pearl, Maria immediately summons Joseph to join her in Dublin from Rome, where he has gone to replenish stock for the Christian artifact business he has inherited from Maria's father, Seymour Meyers...

...Joseph, a widower whose first wife "martyred" herself for her "gift" (her singing voice), becomes obsessed as he walks through the streets of Dublin, while Pearl is recovering in the hospital, with the notion that he must marry her in order to protect the purity for which he believes she had attempted to martyr herself...

...The insult propels him out of the restaurant and launches him on his two days of wandering through the streets of Dublin...

...There is Maria, a single mother who ministers to poor children in the day-care centers she runs...

...Never mind the reasons...

...He's gone round the bend...

...So why Wesleyan...

...Think of me this way: midwife, present at the birth...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "The Jewish War" Virtually all of Mary Gordon's work, fiction and nonfiction, is informed by her Catholicism, but her new novel actually has at its core a latterday holy family...

...It is also during this walk that you are treated to perhaps the most annoying middle-class moment in the book: Joseph is speculating about why Pearl, near perfect in every way, with "two 800s on her college boards," did not apply to Harvard...

...Forgiveness is both offered and received...