Pearl Book

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 illustrate her horror at man's inhumanity to man. Specifically she seems to be all choked up about some Irish boy who washed out of the IRA or something. Funny how the princess had to fly all the way to Ireland to find doomed, broken boys to feel sorry for. I hear the prisons in America are full of boys, most of them black or brown. But I suppose a "liberal" Irish Catholic like Mary Gordon doesn't see black boys in prison as having the same allure as Bobby Sands or Wolfe Tone or Patrick Sarsfield or Mary McCarthy or Studs Lonigan!

This book is not only melodramatic and overwrought, (yes, Mary, I said "overwrought") it is screamingly funny in all the wrong places. For example, Pearl's mother Maria is supposed to have been a hippy yippie student radical back in the Sixties. And there is a long (some would say endless) passage at the beginning describing the feverish uncertainty and the horror, the horror, of living through those days as an angry young college girl. (Was it really that much worse than combat in Vietnam, Mary?) And of course we all know hippies really "dig" that crazy rock and roll music, so Mary keeps quoting lyrics from -- from -- wait for it -- wait for it -- "Feeling Groovy (The 59th Street Bridge Song)" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Now call me crazy, but I don't think the really mean, hardcore, bomb throwing SDS type radicals on campus had much time for Simon and Garfunkel. I think Mary Gordon is laughably out of touch, and that it renders the entire hippy section unbelievable and unreadable. Some more believable hippy tunes for the gang:

"Wooden Ships" by Crosby Stills, Nash and Young
"Going Home" by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After
"Going Up The Country" by Canned Heat
"For What It's Worth" by the Buffalo Springfield
"Feel Like I'm Fixin To Die Rag" by Country Joe and The Fish.

Note well that I was born in 1963, and I have a better idea of good Sixties rock and roll than Mary Gordon. What was this woman really doing all through the Sixties? Sitting in a dark room, saying the rosary with the shades drawn? She sure writes like it!

This is more than just a matter of baby-boomer nostalgia. As a sweaty, desperate social climber from Queens, Mary puts an awful lot of emphasis on the value of "good taste." She claims that one way Pearl can tell that Bobby Sands is not a real martyr is that he writes lousy poetry. (Try that one for logic!) But it therefore follows, using this same logic, that hippies who listen to "Feeling Groovy" instead of "Wooden Ships" are fake hippies, not the real thing. It's a matter of taste, and the irony is that poor, mean, stuck up snob Mary Gordon really has no taste when it comes to rock and roll music. No taste at all.

By the way -- in 1863 there was a major race riot in New York City. A certain portion of the rioters were Irish-Americans. Most of the victims were black. If Mary Gordon is really interested in the "will to harm" maybe she could write about that.

Or maybe not.