Books

Suppose you were an alien, sent from the other side of the galaxy to spy on earthlings. And you needed some kind of manual to bone up on human habits and behavior.

You probably couldn't do any better than to pick up the half-dozen or so novels by Mary Gordon. Not that Ms. Gordon's stories would explain human behavior so much as they would lay it out for you like a field guide. They would warn you in advance: This is what you're getting into.

Ms. Gordon, who will be in town Monday to talk about her work, is often acclaimed as one of the great American Catholic writers, along with Flannery O'Connor and Mary McCarthy.

It's true that she is American and Catholic. "As [short story writer] Grace Paley said, if you're a horse you write as a horse," she said in a recent phone interview from New York, where she teaches at Barnard College. "As a Catholic I was raised with a Catholic grammar and syntax, and in that way I'm a Catholic writer."

But she's ambivalent about being so easily typecast.

"People are always calling John Updike a Protestant writer, as though that's some kind of default position," she says. "I guess if he accepts being called a Protestant writer, I can accept being called a Catholic writer."

Like Ms. O'Connor and Ms. McCarthy, whom she extravagantly admires, Ms. Gordon writes beautifully, in a clear, transparent style that often flashes into poetry, but never calls attention to itself. This, she says, is the fruit of multiple rewrites.

"I have a trunkful of revisions."

Also like many a Catholic writer, she feels ambivalent about the Catholic Church. She left for a time, then returned. But she says she still views the church as male-dominated and finds its teachings, especially on matters of sexuality, "uncongenial."

Sex in her stories is always peripheral to her real interest, which is the family, especially the prickly terrain between mothers – sometimes fathers – and their daughters. Mostly, though not exclusively, she writes about a certain kind of Irish Catholic family once found within a radius of, say, 50 miles of New York. A family like her own.

"My family was wild," she says. "Often there were 25 around the table for dinner at holidays. They were days of tension and anxiety, as well as laughter."

In Mary Gordon stories, as in life – visiting aliens, take heed – people are not quite what they seem. Her father, who died when she was 7, was a devout and conservative Catholic who nonetheless published pornography, ranted against Jews and, she discovered, was secretly a Jewish immigrant. (She explores this strange man in The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for her Father.)

After her father's death, her mother took to drink and the family moved in with Ms. Gordon's grandmother and an assortment of aunts, uncles and other relatives. Her memoir of her flawed, complicated and strangely heroic mother, Circling My Mother, appeared in August.

"The family is a hothouse and caldron of emotion," Ms. Gordon observes.

In Men and Angels, one of her best novels, the bright surface of a seemingly perfect family is disturbed by the arrival of a young woman hired to care for the two children. Convinced that she is chosen of the Lord for some special work, the young woman is anything but godly.

In The Company of Women, an archconservative Catholic priest dominates a circle of admiring women. In Pearl, a seemingly intelligent, calm and beautiful young woman chains herself to the flagpole in front of the American embassy in Dublin with the intent of starving herself to death, to the consternation and grief of everyone who loves her.

Often it's the seemingly pious characters in a Mary Gordon story who turn out to be the most dangerous – the disturbers and destroyers.

"It you read the Gospels carefully, that's the way it plays out," she says. "Christ condemned the Pharisees."

Likewise, her characters often have to suffer the worst before they learn anything about themselves or their lives.

"I'd rather not think so," she says. "But they do."

Plan your life

Mary Gordon will discuss her work as part of the Writer's Studio series, sponsored by Writer's Garret; 7:30 p.m. Monday in Theatre Three in the Quadrangle; tickets for students, seniors and members of the Garret, $28; nonmembers, $34. 214-828-1715.

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