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Overview
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Synopsis
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
The New York Times - John Leonard
Like a hound of heaven, [Gordon] is too busy going down a rabbit hole or up in holy smoke to care whether we adore her or root for her characters. Like her ghostly grandmothers, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, she can't be embarrassed by bodies or ideas. And like the 12th-century nun and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, when she isn't writing poems, composing antiphons, transcribing visions, suffering migraines and talking back to kings and popes, she is equally eager to discuss divine harmony or female orgasm.
Editorials
Donna Rifkind
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.— The Washington Post
John Leonard
Like a hound of heaven, [Gordon] is too busy going down a rabbit hole or up in holy smoke to care whether we adore her or root for her characters. Like her ghostly grandmothers, Mary McCarthy and Flannery O'Connor, she can't be embarrassed by bodies or ideas. And like the 12th-century nun and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, when she isn't writing poems, composing antiphons, transcribing visions, suffering migraines and talking back to kings and popes, she is equally eager to discuss divine harmony or female orgasm.— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Gordon's latest novel opens in medias res on Christmas night in New York City with a phone call from the State Department. Maria Meyers's 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, supposedly studying linguistics for a year in Ireland, has chained herself to a flagpole outside the American embassy in Dublin. For reasons that are unclear, she has starved herself for six weeks and is now in serious danger of dying from dehydration. Without understanding Pearl's motivation for the hunger strike, Maria must try and save her daughter's life. Readers of Gordon's fiction (Spending; The Company of Women) and memoir (The Shadow Man) will recognize familiar themes in her latest book: Maria is a single mother raised as a Catholic by her converted Jewish father; she comes of age in the 1960s and trades her religion for that era's brand of critical thinking. Now, with her daughter dying, Maria must re-examine her faith, her parenting and her political ideals. Told by an unidentified first-person narrator, the story unfolds over the course of a few days. Even as the life-or-death crisis comes to a head, Maria and her best friend, Joseph, are busy tackling God, sacrifice, female autonomy and the meaning of happiness. The novel's conceit provides plenty of opportunities for philosophical musing, but given this set of morose and mostly unlikable characters, the relentless self-examination grows tedious. Agent Peter Matson at Sterling Lord Literistic. 7-city author tour. (Jan. 11) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.KLIATT
When 20-year-old Pearl Meyers chains herself to a post outside the American Embassy in Dublin, she has already starved herself for six weeks and is prepared to die as a "witness" to the death of a young boy. Her mother, Maria Meyers, and surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman, rush to her, one from America and the other from Rome, only to be turned away at first, leaving them wondering what has led to this situation. This is a story of a particular family, but also a philosophical and religious exploration of family, forgiveness, commitment and love. Mary Gordon explores the lives of all the characters, using an interesting narrative style, to reveal the details of the unusual lives of Maria and Joseph and of Pearl's experience with the "Real IRA" while studying at Trinity College. The violent history of Ireland, as well as the tumultuous lives of her own mother, father and other family members, is brought into play in the development of the characters. It is an intricate book of ideas that would lead advanced students to some meaningful discussions of what is worth dying for on a political and personal level and how family history affects our development. KLIATT Codes: SA--Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2005, Random House, Anchor, 354p., $14.00.. Ages 15 to adult.—Nola Theiss
Library Journal
In New York City, Maria Meyers, a 50-year-old single mother and force of nature under the best of circumstances, receives an urgent call from the U.S. State Department on Christmas Day in 1998. Her 20-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself to the flagpole of the U.S. Embassy in Dublin and is near death after a six-week fast and several days without water. Maria summons from Rome her lifelong friend Joseph Kasperman, who loves Pearl like a daughter. The Catholic Church, complicated family and class relationships, and current events-mainstays of Gordon's considerable body of work (e.g., Final Payments)-play out powerfully in this riveting tale of a mother's fierce, unstoppable determination to save her daughter. Gordon's genius with the well-placed detail and the seemingly casual comment quite literally alters the history of her characters and creates an atmosphere of nerve-racking tension that hurts. Religion, political martyrdom, and thwarted dreams do battle with maternal desperation and cautious hope. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/04.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
An overly intense, multilayered tale about three characters facing a life-and-death situation, a state of affairs brought into being by religion, class, social consciousness, and political activism. Once again, Gordon, astute observer of Catholicism and the inner lives of women in both fiction and nonfiction (Spending, 1998; Joan of Arc, 2000, etc.), continues her quest for meaning. Here, on Christmas night 1998, Maria Meyers receives a call that her 20-year old daughter, Pearl, who is studying Irish at Trinity College, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and is near death from self-starvation. As a distraught, uncomprehending Maria flies to Ireland and her beloved only child, an omniscient narrator begins the chronicle, framed by 20th-century history, of Maria, Joseph, and Pearl, a trio strongly evoking the Holy Family. Maria is a child of the '60s. She rebelled against the privileged, repressive Catholic childhood provided for her by her wealthy, conservative father, and had an affair with a refugee from Pol Pot's Cambodia, a doctor who returned to his homeland and certain death, never knowing he had fathered a child. We're then made privy to Pearl's story, the most interesting and freshest of the three, her Dublin experiences with the "new IRA" and, before that, her growing up as the shy daughter of the strong-willed Maria and a surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman. Joseph was Maria's childhood friend, the housekeeper's son whom Maria's father educated and to whom he willed his successful business in religious kitsch. Through the narrator, we learn about Joseph's sacrifice of an academic career to satisfy his obligation to Maria's father, and his obsessionwith doing the right thing. The three converge in Dublin. As Pearl, hospitalized, clings to life, they're forced to face the present and the past, and the question of what's worth the price of staying alive. Elegant prose, thought-provoking plot, mammoth themes-and sometimes slow-going.Book Details
Published
April 1, 2006
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
368
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9781400078073