The Other Side by Mary Gordon

First published: 1989

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: 1895-1985

Locale: New York City and Ireland

Principal Characters:

• Ellen Costelloe MacNamara, the matriarch of the MacNamara family, who is dying of a stroke
• Vincent MacNamara, Ellen’s husband, who is returning home after a ten-month stay in a nursing home
• Magdalene MacNamara, Ellen and Vincent’s oldest daughter, an alcoholic beautician who has not left her room in fifteen years
• Theresa MacNamara Dooley, the middle child, a medical secretary and religious fanatic
• Camille (Cam) MacNamara, Magdalene’s only child, a divorce lawyer
• Dan MacNamara, Cam’s cousin and law partner

The Novel

The Other Side traces an Irish American family, the MacNamaras, through five generations, from the “old sod” to “the other side,” as the Irish called America. Framed by the events of one day, August 14, 1985, the story spans ninety years, weaving the memories of various family members throughout to tell the tale. The book consists of five sections: The first and last parts introduce the family members and set the scene in the present; the second relates Ellen MacNamara’s memories of her life; the third explores the lives of second-, third-and fourth-generation MacNamaras; and the fourth recounts the past from Vincent’s point of view.

The novel opens as Vincent MacNamara recalls the night some ten months earlier when his wife Ellen, ninety years old and cruelly debilitated from a series of strokes, rises from her bed and strikes out at him in a senseless rage. She knocks him down, breaking his hip and leaving him helpless as she wanders into the street in her nightclothes. Vincent, who summons help by hurling family heirlooms through the window, spends ten months in a rest home recuperating, while Ellen continues to fluctuate between rage, fear, and sleep under the care of a domineering nurse at home. The story returns to the present as the family gathers to celebrate Vincent’s return from the nursing home.

As Ellen drifts closer to death, her memories of the past become stronger than her grip on the present, and she relives her life. Her idyllic existence as the only child of a beautiful mother and handsome, successful father degenerates into a nightmare as her mother is transformed by a series of miscarriages and stillbirths into a fat, gibbering madwoman while her father takes up with another woman. The remainder of Ellen’s childhood is spent caring for and concealing her mother, nourishing a profound hatred for her once-beloved father, and plotting her escape to America by stealing from her father’s business. Leaving her mother in the care of a hired girl, she arrives in America, taking jobs first as a lady’s maid and later as a seamstress. Her anger and resentment are further nourished by servitude and miserable working conditions, and she becomes passionately interested in the union movement and politics. She falls in love with and marries Vincent MacNamara and begins her life as wife and mother.

Vincent also escapes a miserable, poverty-stricken childhood in Ireland by emigrating to America. He accepts the first position he is offered, an unspeakably miserable job digging the New York City subway system, although he trained as an ironworker in Ireland. He later works as a signal repairman and machinist and becomes actively involved in union organizing until a heart attack forces him to take up a less stressful occupation and give up union activity.

Ellen and Vincent, although devoted to each other, fail as parents. Ellen dislikes her daughters and lavishes all of her attention on her only son, John. The oldest daughter, Magdalene, marries hastily in search of the affection she missed at home, is widowed early, and becomes an alcoholic, self-imposed invalid, leaving the responsibility of rearing her daughter, Cam, to her parents. Theresa, the second daughter, is cold, judgmental, and filled with hate. She passes her mother’s coldness on to her own children. Their son John impregnates a girl and must marry her before going off to be killed in the war. Ellen intimidates her daughter-in-law into leaving the child, Dan, for her and Vincent to rear. It is only with these grandchildren, Dan and Cam, that Ellen is able to provide the maternal love that was withheld from her own children. Dan and Cam grow up much closer than most brothers and sisters, and they are loving toward and protective of their surrogate parents.

As the novel returns to 1985, Cam picks up a reluctant Vincent at the nursing home to return him to care for Ellen and to keep the promise made early in their marriage that she will die in her own bed. Dreading the ties of family obligations and complications after the easy sociability of the nursing home, Vincent nevertheless realizes as he enters the house and sees his wife again that home is where he belongs.

The Characters

Ellen MacNamara embodies many of the worst aspects of Irish culture and experience. Although she is bright, opinionated, and outspoken by nature, her childhood taught her concealment, shame, insularity, and anger. She has not adopted the American Dream, the pursuit of happiness: “She’d never believed in happiness. The mention of it put her in a fury.” Although a voracious reader, passionately interested in the outside world, she shrinks her own universe to claustrophobic dimensions, allowing none but family and the closest friends inside her home.

Vincent, on the other hand, embodies more positive aspects of the Irish character. Despite a difficult childhood in the old country, plagued by an older brother who hated him and drove him from home, he did not carry anger and bitterness with him to the new world. Although not as sharp and quick as his wife, he is kinder and more decent. Outgoing and friendly, he finds life at the nursing home refreshingly sociable and relaxed after his intense and confined life with Ellen.

Theresa Dooley is the product of Ellen’s coldness and indifference as a mother. A medical secretary and a charismatic Catholic, she poisons everyone around her with bitterness, anger, and jealousy. Believing she is blessed with the power to heal, she spitefully withholds this “gift” from her dying mother. Her children—John, a Vietnam veteran unable to hold a job or a marriage together; Sheila, an unlikeable, self-despising former nun; and Marilyn, with three failed marriages behind her—are heirs to the hatred and bitterness that flow through the family’s bloodlines.

Her sister Magdalene has been ruined by this familial poison as well. Pretty and soft, the antithesis of her mother, she has become a professional invalid, a role in which she can both receive sympathy and have control over her surroundings. Equipped with a big-screen television with remote control and bedside microwave oven, she interacts with the world on her terms, gossiping on the phone, entertaining visitors, and perusing her wardrobe in the safety of her room.

The two favored grandchildren, Cam and Dan, have also been poisoned by the family hatreds, jealousies, and feuds, but they fare somewhat better than their parents’ generation. They receive the love, attention, and interest that their grandparents withheld from their own children, and they thrive academically and professionally. Both, however, have failed marriages, Dan is divorced, and Cam is married in name only. Dan grieves for the family that might have been and the time lost with his daughters, and although he has lived with a woman for fourteen years, he does not marry again. Cam, a prisoner to her own “good girl” instincts, lives with and cares for her self-pitying “invalid” mother and cannot bring herself to leave the husband she pities but no longer loves. She has finally met a man she loves, but her feelings of duty to her mother, her grandparents, and her husband prevent her from committing herself to him.

Critical Context

Mary Gordon’s work can be placed in three literary traditions: the Catholic novel, the Irish American novel, and the feminist novel. Each of her novels exemplifies at least one, and sometimes more than one, of these genres, but Gordon is most often considered a Catholic novelist. Her first two books, Final Payments (1978) and The Company of Women (1980), are the most explicitly Catholic of her work, dealing with the protagonists’ struggles to reconcile their own spirituality with the traditions and dictums of the church hierarchy. Her third book, Men and Angels (1985), can be classified as a religious but not specifically Catholic novel, as the protagonist struggles with her relationship to a fanatical fundamentalist Christian.

Most of Gordon’s work can also be seen in feminist terms. Both Final Payments and The Company of Women feature women not only questioning their relationship with the church hierarchy but also struggling against their dependence upon the strong male figures in their lives. In Men and Angels, the protagonist struggles to come to terms with the conflict between her career and her children, and The Other Side, while not directly confronting feminist issues, features several strong female characters.

Much of Gordon’s work can be placed squarely in the tradition of Irish American fiction, alongside the works of such writers as James T. Farrell, Jimmy Breslin, John O’Hara, John Gregory Dunne, and Edwin O’Connor. The Other Side, in particular, concentrates on the Irish component of the Irish Catholic experience in America. Gordon’s work conforms to critic James Liddy’s characterization of Irish American fiction as “a dramatic, easily accessible story in which men and women with divided loyalties and sensibilities work out their fate.” In a controversial 1988 article published in The New York Times Book Review, Gordon accounted for what she saw as a shortage of Irish American novelists by discussing the Irish traits of concealment, sexual puritanism, and fear of exposure, traits, she wrote, that contributed to this shortage. Many critics and writers, however, have disagreed with her assessment and have argued for the recognition of a rich tradition of Irish American literature.

Bibliography

Bennet, Alma. Mary Gordon. New York: Twayne, 1996. In this first book-length study of Mary Gordon, Bennet draws on personal interviews with Gordon as well as other primary and secondary resources to provide students and scholars with a comprehensive introduction to Gordon’s work. Includes excellent resources in chronology, notes and references, bibliography, and index sections.

Cooper-Clark, Diana. “An Interview with Mary Gordon.” Commonweal 107 (May 9, 1980): 270-273. In this early interview, Gordon discusses Final Payments as a Catholic novel and examines the religious novel in general. She considers issues relevant to The Other Side, including the Irish Catholic immigrant experience in America. She also reveals her own preferences in literature, her reaction to her critics, and what she likes best about her own work.

Gordon, Mary. Interview by Patrick H. Samway. America 170 (May 14, 1994): 12-15. A revealing glimpse of Gordon’s childhood, Catholic education, and writing career. Although she does not specifically address The Other Side, this illuminating interview sheds considerable light on the major themes in her works.

Gordon, Mary. “Radical Damage: An Interview with Mary Gordon.” Interview by M. Deiter Keyishian. The Literary Review 32 (Fall, 1988): 69-82. Gordon discusses her collection of short stories Temporary Shelter (1987). Commenting on writing about women and children, she asserts that “to write about women and children is to be immediately ghettoized. . . .” She also reveals her own literary likes (which include Marguerite Duras and the German writer Christa Wolfe) and dislikes (which include Joseph Conrad and John Updike).

Liddy, James. “The Double Vision of Irish-American Fiction.” Eire-Ireland 19 (Winter, 1984): 6-15. An examination of Irish American fiction; helpful in understanding Gordon’s work. Liddy discusses those writers he classifies as Irish American (James T. Farrell, Edwin O’Connor, Jimmy Breslin, and Mary Gordon) as well as those he does not (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Flannery O’Connor).

Mahon, John. “Mary Gordon: The Struggle with Love.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. A study of Final Payments, The Company of Women, and Men and Angels in terms of their religious motifs. Includes a bibliography of Gordon’s work, including books, poems, articles, reviews, and stories, and a bibliography of writing about her.

Ward, Catherine. “Wake Homes: Four Modern Novels of the Irish American Family.” Eire-Ireland 26 (Summer, 1991): 78-91. An examination of four Irish American novels by women, including The Other Side. Ward reveals “how later generations try to escape the stultifying ties to family and church that had served the needs of their parents and grandparents but now threaten to overwhelm them.” A straightforward evaluation of the novel as a study of the Irish American family.