Gordon's talents as a mesmerizing storyteller and a chronicler of the human heart come together in a brutally honest and tenderly compassionate novel about a family who transcend their particularities to represent the saga of Irish immigrants and their descendants in America--"the Other Side." Married for 66 years, Ellen and Vincent MacNamara have parented three children (one died in WW II), raised two of their five grandchildren and passed from penury into the middle class. Now Ellen lies dying, emerging briefly from her semi-comatose state to scream and fight against the shackling of her soul in a moribund body; in one such rage, she knocked Vincent down, breaking his hip. Vincent is returning home after convalescence to honor his promise to stay with Ellen until she dies. Most of their family still live within a several-block radius in Queens, N.Y., and they have gathered for Vincent's return. In spare, astringent prose and beautifully controlled kaleidoscopic episodes, Gordon delineates the four generations of this family, exposing their personalities by virtue of her ironic eye. The offspring of the marriage between high-principled, indomitable Ellen, whose "love for vengeance would mark her life," and gentle, steady Vincent have carried a heritage of stony anger and heartache. They illustrate a tragedy common to many families: that two people connected in passionate union may produce children they cannot love. More fundamentally, the MacNamaras represent the Irish: "unhappiness was bred into the bone, a message in the blood . . . they had to thwart joy in their lives." Gordon shows how difficult it is for anyone "to make a life," to persevere in a personal quest for happiness while attempting to not hurt others. In the end, she has illumined "this impossible endeavor" with rare candor and understanding.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Acute observer of the particular anguish of women brought up Catholic in this country, Gordon here takes on several generations of an Irish American family and their experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The story unfolds on a single day at the home of Vincent and Ellen McNamara, whose family has gathered for Vincent's return from a nursing home--his wife Ellen, disabled by a stroke, having injured him by pushing him to the floor in a fit of confusion. Using this gathering to explore family history, beginning with Ellen's and Vincent's separate and very different departures from Ireland, Gordon lays bare a legacy of lovelessness and defeat passed from parent to child to grandchild. So many people are implicated in this defeat that it is hard to keep track of everyone--and, indeed, to believe that not one of them could have risen above it. Gordon is as ever a fine prose stylist, her characterizations deft and her detailing of human antagonisms and flaws merciless and exact, but it can begin to wear.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"