OPINION:
THE LIAR’S WIFE
By Mary Gordon
Pantheon, $25.95, 304 pages
The artful relationships among the four novellas collected in Mary Gordon’s “The Liar’s Wife” make this volume way more than the sum of its parts. This is not to imply shortcomings in the individual tales; rather to note the rich satisfactions of reading each in the context of the others.
In the title story, Jocelyn, now seventy-ish, re-encounters Johnny, the Irishman she married as a young girl. He arrives at her New Canaan home in a Frito-Lay truck. It turns out he and girlfriend Linnet are driving it to make ends meet, and they’ve stopped by to see if she’ll put them up for the night. In return, they take her out to a pizzeria where they are singing for their suppers. All this is far from Jocelyn’s comfortable bourgeois life: weekdays at her New York apartment, weekends at the New Canaan house inherited from her parents, and longer summer stays at the Nantucket home.
Jocelyn had divorced Johnny because he told lies. His Dublin friends could also be parsimonious with the truth, not necessarily to deceive, but as needed to tell a better story, have “a good gas.” Feeling the world slipping away from her, Jocelyn fled back to America. She remarried — happily. But when Johnny says, “I’ve always loved life,” she cannot say the same. “She knew she’d been fortunate, been spared the large, more dramatic tragedies … . She would say she’d been happy. But always she felt that her luck was just a trick. It wasn’t that life was good. It was that she had been lucky.” As Johnny drives away the next morning, she realizes that “[w]ithout Johnny, she wouldn’t have known really who she was. Because he had taught her what she was not.” She knows, too, that he had “lived life abundantly.” She had not.
Johnny, though a liar, is a delight, whereas Simone Weil, though utterly devoted to telling the truth, can be a real pain. Weil, the French intellectual, lived briefly in New York during 1942, when she fled from Nazi-occupied France. In Ms. Gordon’s “Simone Weil in New York,” she meets an old pupil, Genevieve, now a young mother, and eagerly tries to enlist her in a scheme to parachute nurses behind German lines. Genevieve admires Mlle. Weil above all teachers and people, but finds her refusal to make the slightest accommodation to everyday life — her insistence on living the life of the downtrodden — makes her difficult and sometimes unpleasant.
Both these novellas contrast another country with America: Ireland with its humor and ease against middle-class America, with its unimaginative comfort; France with its punctiliousness and wartime tragedy with an America that is safe but nonetheless has issues beyond Weil’s brilliant but narrow ken. In a similar World War II story, “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana,” a retired doctor recalls the time when he introduced Thomas Mann as a speaker at his high school. Mann had left Hitler’s Germany, and was eager to denounce Nazism. As the once-proud schoolboy looks back, he knows that Mann affected his life by showing that “America was not the world, and that we, as Americans, had no right to the lulling music which was not of the spheres, not even of the sirens, but the low hum of cave-dwellers who didn’t even have the wit to see the shadows.”
This stern conclusion contrasts with the idyllic finale of “Fine Arts.” Its heroine, Theresa Riordan, had a difficult childhood, but the nuns who taught her steered her to Yale. Eventually, she gets to Lucca in Italy to study an early-Renaissance artist. Italy is all she ever dreamed it would be. She loves it for all the obvious reasons. Then she does something — something principled — that forces her to leave, and also to consider whether she really wants an academic career in art history. Then, just as the gray doors of ordinary life in America seems poised to close on her, the powerful author Mary Gordon rescues her in a stroke that affirms the possibility of happiness in Italy.
The meatiness of these novellas comes from Ms. Gordon’s resistance to over-elaboration, coupled with her riveting choice of detail. She pinpoints facets that highlight character: Weil asking for Genevieve’s last hoarded lipstick so she can look more ordinary; Theresa checking the size of her lover’s wife’s bra found drying in the bathroom. Ms. Gordon also poses contrasts and similarities, yet gives her central characters an innocence that allows them to be purely and reasonably themselves. She asserts values: the importance of honesty, beauty and self-reflection. These qualities shine the more brightly because the four novellas in this volume have the genre’s characteristic combination of close narrative focus with enough wattage to pick out complexities of situation and character. What a blessing for their readers.
Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.
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