GOOD BOYS AND DEAD GIRLS: And Other Essays

by Mary Gordon ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1991

In this collection of essays, all but the title one previously published, novelist Gordon (The Other Side, 1989; Men and Angels, 1985, etc.) demonstrates that she is a discriminating reviewer, as well as a perceptive, eloquent, and, to use a favorite word of hers, ""engaged"" social commentator, especially on feminist and religious issues. Comprised primarily of reviews from The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books or introductions to volumes of individual writers, the first section presents such major modern figures as Edith Wharton, Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and such minor ones as Stevie Smith, Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachman, and David Plante. Gordon provides access to the authors--mostly women writers--or men who write knowingly about women by identifying something significant in their appearance, background, motivation: Wharton was ""a lady""; Smith ""believed herself supremely ordinary""; McCarthy's ""world is full of interesting things."" The second section, ""The World, The Church, The Lives of Women,"" develops a historical image of Ellis Island, evoking the atmosphere that awaited immigrants, including Gordon's grandmother. It also includes two eloquent essays on abortion that avoid the ""bad taste"" to which Gordon claims such moral issues are ""peculiarly conducive,"" and presents several essays, both comic and poignant, on Irish-Catholic Americans, concluding with Gordon's family's rejection of her as a ""lost soul"" for writing about sex. The last section affirms Gordon's self-characterization as a writer about human relationships rather than about the ""music of the spheres."" Here, journal entries record her musings on death, motherhood, and writing, their conflicts and rewards. Gordon's strengths are her style, the ironic reductive image (such as that in the title essay--which is about male heroes in Dreiser, Faulkner, and Updike novels and the women who die in them), and the arresting topic sentence: ""The only child of older parents leads an unreal life."" Modest, sensible, penetrating.

Pub Date: April 1, 1991

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991

Categories: NONFICTION