Well, once again Mary Gordon is back, with another long, slow, soggy novel of Catholic guilt, cheap man-bashing feminism, and crude shanty Irish bigotry and self-pity. This time the plot is quite bizarre -- a spoiled Manhattan princess jets to Ireland and chains herself to the American embassy to...
As good as biographies get, this one was pretty good. I personally am not a fan of spending precious time in my life reading about someone else's (not that I'm saying books like this are a waste of time, they're just not my favorite thing). And as for the story itself, no one can say it's not at ...
This is the first Mary Gordon novel I've read--an exploration of mother love & the terrible effects of its lack. I sometimes felt that passages on the emotional permutations of the characters--especially Anne, the main protagonist--went on too long, particularly when reflecting her uncertainty a...
They walk up the elaborate marble staircase, through the doors flanked by Corinthian columns, not even stopping to buy a ticket. He’s told her the collection is undistinguished, not worth the steep admission price. “You don’t come to Rome for museums,” he tells her. “There are only one or two tha...
in her Italian-English dictionary. Debole. She said the word to herself. Then she made a noun of it. Debolezza. Weakness. He was a weak man, he was very weak, she said silently, to no one in particular. Or it wasn’t to no one; it was to many people, to whom she felt an obligation to explain. At t...