PEARL
By Mary Gordon
Pantheon. 354 pp. $24.95
The anxiety of the established novelist -- the panicky feeling that one's best stuff has been used up, the well gone dry -- does not appear to plague Mary Gordon, who in eight books of fiction has fetched story after story from a creative source that seems inexhaustible. There are echoing themes throughout her work, to be sure, and repeating character types: plucky, tart-tongued heroines, most of whom are Catholic left-wing activists; ardent male Jewish paramours; protective priests or priestlike father figures. Despite the similarities, these works bubble with perceptions and appreciations that seem, each time, genuinely new.
Gordon has often been praised for writing unflinchingly about politics and religion in her novels. It would be wrong, though, to claim that she is foremost a political or a religious writer, because while she takes both subjects seriously, they are never as important in her fiction as her main interest, which is nothing less than the infinite variety of emotional entanglement. Her latest novel, Pearl, is a case in point, for while its plot hinges on an act of political extremism and traces the influence of Catholicism on its characters, it is more crucially the story of a difficult mother-daughter relationship that has reached a point of emergency.
It is Christmas night in New York City, 1998, when Maria Meyers gets a call from the State Department to tell her that her 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, who is in Dublin studying languages, has chained herself to a flagpole outside the American embassy. The details are sketchy: Pearl has been on some kind of hunger strike for six weeks, but IRA involvement is not suspected. Maria makes hasty travel plans and asks Joseph Kasperman, her lifelong friend and Pearl's surrogate father, to abandon his business trip in Rome and meet her in Dublin.
One of the artistic challenges Gordon has set for herself is that of proceeding with a novel whose crisis has occurred before the book has begun. Pearl turns into a waiting game as soon as Maria and Joseph arrive in Dublin. After Pearl is cut from the flagpole by the Dublin police and brought to the hospital, she continues defiantly to pursue her death, while an equally stubborn doctor fights back with medication and fluids. Because the doctor believes their interference might cause more harm, she forbids Maria and Joseph to see Pearl; they can do nothing except rummage fretfully through Pearl's history, and their own, for possible causes of this calamity.
So back Gordon plunges into each of these three pasts. Joseph's is the loneliest: He grew up with Maria and her father as their housekeeper's son and has felt inadequate ever since. He wanders the Dublin streets like a sorrowing Leopold Bloom, wondering what use he can be now to Pearl, who has always adored him.
More bewildered even than Joseph is Maria, who sought to give Pearl the freedom she herself was denied by her father, a convert from Judaism to an all-absorbing, conservative Catholicism. Maria raised Pearl in the chaotic Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where Maria supervises several day-care centers with a dauntless vigor. But Pearl, a delicate girl as opaque as her name, never felt safe in Maria's whirlwind world and "may not," as the novel's omniscient narrator comments, "have been given the right kind of childhood for the child she was." Pearl came to Ireland still delicate, unsure of everything except her passion for the Irish language, hostile toward her mother's left-wing, Vietnam-era politics and not knowing much about her real father, a refugee from Pol Pot's Cambodia who returned to his country and disappeared there before Pearl was born. In Dublin, she falls in with a group of hipster quasi-revolutionaries and discovers a heritage she can love: not her own country's smug, vainglorious history but one that celebrates martyrdom, hunger strikers, Bobby Sands. When a ridiculous series of mishaps engineered by Pearl's circle results in the death of a mentally debilitated boy whom Pearl had befriended, she makes a confused attempt to take responsibility for the death and to manipulate history by embarking on a hunger strike of her own.
As a result, Pearl is not only drawn to a quintessentially Catholic culture but seeks to emulate, in her obsession with martyrdom and fasting, the lives of the saints. There is here, as in all of Gordon's fiction, a perpetual dance toward and away from the seductive arms of the Church, a personal captivation that she has also recorded in her soulful biography of Joan of Arc and her anguished memoir of her father, The Shadow Man. Religion, politics, Americans abroad, lives full of ongoing errors and regrets: Gordon keeps a lot of plates spinning here in a novel that is really just a long series of absorbing digressions. Somehow, though, Gordon is able to maintain her focus on Maria and Pearl, who for all their disappointment in each other are nevertheless lovingly bound together, and who are finally able to achieve a reconciliation that is, like every good ending, both surprising and unavoidable. Gordon's job here was to show the intimacy in Pearl's grand stunt and the grandness in the intimate mother-daughter reunion that follows. In both of those tasks, she has most artfully succeeded. •
Donna Rifkind writes frequently about contemporary literature.
