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The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas, by Mary Gordon
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In the short novels that make up this beautiful collection, Mary Gordon presents a quartet of finely rendered, emotionally resonant stories. Here we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her last days as a transplant in New York City; a vulnerable American graduate student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title, who gets more out of life than most; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high schooler in the Midwest. At every turn, Gordon revels in the interactions and crucial flashes of understanding that change lives forever. Entrancing reading, The Liar’s Wife is a wonderful demonstration of Gordon’s literary mastery and human sympathy.
- Sales Rank: #617533 in Books
- Published on: 2015-07-07
- Released on: 2015-07-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .61" w x 5.18" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Q&A for Liar's Wife with author Mary Gordon
Q1.: Why the form of the four novellas? What does this format allow you to do that another format might not? Are there any limitations?
Mary Gordon: I like the form because it combines the intensity of a short story, the focus on a single event, moment, turning point, allows for space for exploration, but doesn’t require the creation of a whole world, which a novel does. I have been very drawn to great writers using the form: William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev, Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Eudora Welty’s June Recital, Turgenev’s First Love.
Q2.: The protagonists in The Liar's Wife all seem to be shaped in some way by their complex relationships with their mothers. It is as if remembering their mothers is their portal to the past, opening them up to feeling and allowing them to look at their own lives in a new light. These characters seem to be deeply, almost compulsively attached to their mothers, seeing them as the embodiment of perfection, and what is right, valuing their sacrifices, yet simultaneously striving to live their own separate lives. How do these mother-child relationships define your characters?
MG: I have noted that mothers get rather a bad rap in literature, and I wanted to explore the tremendous force and power mothers have, and the limitations of understanding that a child has of her or his mother; an adult child is always a child in relation to the mother.
Q3.: The theme of knowledge and intelligence as both a gift yet also a burden comes up throughout your stories. Can you comment on the repeated intertwining of intelligence and suffering?
MG: Perhaps I would substitute the word consciousness for intelligence, a sense that I have that awareness of the world inevitably leads to an awareness of the suffering involved in living. What Virginia Woolf says as the danger “Of living life for even one day.” Humans do an enormous amount to muffle or obscure the knowledge and implications of suffering; in The Liar's Wife I wanted to turn the question on its head, and ask if increased consciousness automatically means increased life, or richness of life.
Q4.: A few of your stories allude to World War II and the deep suffering of the Jewish people. There is a dichotomy between this suffering in Europe and the events of daily life in some of your stories. It is particularly evident even in the title of one of your novellas, "Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana." Though the horrors of World War II occurred far away from places such as New York City or Gary, Indiana, your characters are still deeply affected. What effects does the displacement of such suffering have on your characters?
MG: One of the great separations between Americans and Europeans is that we have not experienced war on our own soil. This has allowed for a particular kind of American innocence, which my character Bill is forced to relinquish when he meets Thomas Mann and later when he is involved in the War itself. Once again, I am dealing with questions of consciousness and its costs.
Q5.: In each of your novellas, the protagonist looks back on momentous experiences from their childhoods that have allowed them to grow and come of age. How do your writing techniques of prolepsis and analepsis add to your stories as a whole? What other writing techniques do you employ to allow for this spanning of time to work so well in a shorter piece?
MG: I always want to anchor “momentous experiences” in the physical world, to avoid vagueness and abstraction, to root memory in the lived life of the body. In a shorter piece, one has to explore the mystery of the instantaneous leaps in time our mind makes while our bodies remain fixed in space.
Q6.: Many of your stories discuss characters that travel to different parts of the world and change in some way. What is the importance of travel for your characters and in what ways do their experiences in new places leave them altered?
MG: For Jocelyn and Theresa, travel is both an adventure and a challenge, uprooting them from what they both consider are too comfortable, too small contexts, catapulting them into a larger world, but also reinforcing and clarifying their own identities, helping them to understand more fully who they really are by confronting their sense of difference from the new place.
Q7.: There seems to be a continuous theme of teachers and students throughout this collection, which looks at the complex relationships between old world teachers and new world students. Having been a teacher yourself, what is the importance of this theme and what can we learn from it?
MG: I am very interested in the complex, rather fragile, intense relationship between teachers and students, how this must grow and develop if it is going to be fruitful rather than stultifying as the student grows and matures. Good teachers know how to impart knowledge and to leave room for the student to go in her own direction, even go beyond the teacher. And we encounter teachers in surprising places, not just the formal classroom.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The virtuosic Gordon (The Love of My Youth, 2011) presents a quartet of enfolding novellas that examine the revelations and paradoxes of cross-cultural encounters and relationships between mentors and protégés. Two WWII tales offer disquieting views of pre–Pearl Harbor America while portraying two historical figures who strike deep chords in Gordon’s sustained inquiry into the meaning and resonance of faith and art. In “Simone Weil in New York,” an enthralled former student of Weil’s in France has emigrated and married an American and is reluctant to open her new life to the now unnerving mystic and activist. In “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana,” naive high-school student Bill has his shrink-wrapped world ripped open by two cosmopolitan Jewish teachers, who arrange for him to introduce the heroic German writer when Mann speaks at the school. The title story, in which a Connecticut woman is shocked by the vaguely menacing reappearance of her roguish Irish first husband, is a masterwork of subtlety and wit. And “Fine Arts” is a gloriously imaginative and thrilling improvisation on Henry James’ tales of young American women abroad. The sheer bliss of reading Gordon’s consummate prose is deepened by her stunning insights into moral tangles and abrupt comprehension as she mixes the comic and the profound in her considerations of innocence and defilement, self-sacrifice and greatness, insularity and the bracing tussle of the world. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Beloved and much-honored, Gordon is at her captivating finest in a book primed to catch fire. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Richly imagined and finely wrought. . . . The Liar’s Wife feels both warmly familiar and arrestingly original.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“The intelligence that breathes through [Gordon’s] characters tirelessly raises the unanswerable questions that animate all great fiction, lifting the reader out of the story and into the realm of ethical dilemma.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Pitch-perfect. . . . [Here are] four stories that are models of compression and searing insight. . . . Gordon’s voice is wry, her prose velvety.” —Oprah Magazine
“Thought-provoking. . . . The contemplative tales collected in The Liar’s Wife . . . force us to slow down and reflect. . . . Gordon’s characters are critical thinkers, people whose minds churn constantly with questions.” —The Washington Post
“Gordon’s skills are formidable; her writing, careful and exact. . . . [She] excels at the kind of minute observations that make her characters real.” —The Boston Globe
“Artful. . . . Riveting. . . . 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.” —The Washington Times
“A satisfying mix of narrative and perception. . . . [A] delight. . . . As Gordon admirably demonstrates in this quartet, the novella with its concentrated range is as pleasing a genre as any other.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch
“The Liar’s Wife glints with Gordon’s enduring mettle: She draws from the dross of everyday life, a hidden gold. . . . Gordon is at her best.” —The Buffalo News
“[A] beautifully rendered book. . . . The novella is an underutilized form, but Gordon shows a great affinity for its necessary constraints. In each 60-or-so-page story she manages to compress a trove of details, giving readers wholly fleshed worlds to savor and contemplate.” —BookPage
“Gordon returns to her favorite thematic territory: faith, innocence and their loss, intellectual ambition, physical affliction, self-sacrifice and guilt. . . . [She] enchants.” —Montgomery Advertiser
“Gordon[‘s] book is worth reading, for her wonderful language, her insights and her willingness to take on difficult issues.” —The National (AE)
“The Liar’s Wife is a meaty and thoughtful book. . . . These are stories told in memory and questions by characters still moved by encounters and ideas that shaped them in pivotal moments. . . . Emotional and insightful.” —Book Reporter
“Incandescent. . . . Just like a great Gordon novel times four.” —Library Journal
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Wordy and poignant, emotional and insightful, this is a demanding and often difficult work of fiction from the talented Gordon.
By Bookreporter
THE LIAR'S WIFE by Mary Gordon is a collection of four introspective and quite literary novellas centering on themes of transformation and place.
“Simone Weil in New York” introduces Genevieve Levy, a young French wife and mother, and former philosophy student, living with her brother and 13-month-old son in New York. Her husband, an American doctor, is stationed overseas. Though she knew that her former teacher, the eccentric philosopher and activist Simone Weil, was currently in New York as well, she is shocked to see her across the street, calling to her wearing a filthy beret and cape. After nine years, Mlle Weil is suddenly back in Genevieve's life --- coming around for tea and visiting her and her brother, an important psychologist. Her time with the strange and brilliant Weil, who is trying to get back to Europe despite the fact that she and her parents, who are secular Jews, escaped Hitler to come to New York, forces Genevieve to consider her own place in the world. She is French, but her son and husband are American. She was raised Christian but is studying Hebrew and raising her son Jewish. She had a promising academic career ahead of her, but now is primarily a caretaker for her son and disabled brother. She is both drawn to and repelled by Weil.
In the story, Genevieve confronts ideas of genius and respect, love and loyalty, as she examines the woman she has grown into over the past decade by considering her former teacher. The historical character of Simone Weil is deftly handled by Gordon, who captures the strangeness, illogic and powerful intelligence she was known for. Genevieve is a compelling counterbalance to Weil; quiet but smart, also displaced and one who feels the need to care for others, even to her own detriment.
“Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” shares much in common with the novella about Simone Weil. Here also, Gordon gives readers a young and impressionable student who confronts a greatness that changes his life. In 1939 (just a handful of years before the Simone Weil story takes place), Bill Morton, a high school senior known for landing all the leading roles in school plays, is selected to introduce the famous German novelist Thomas Mann at a school event and then drive him to Chicago. This is arranged by Bill's favorite teachers, the Hauptmanns, Jewish intellectuals who don't quite fit into Gary, Indiana culture. The encounter with Mann, as well as his time learning with the Hauptmanns, inspire Bill to view the world in ways he may not have otherwise.
In the titular novella, “The Liar's Wife,” Jocelyn's long-estranged Irish husband shows up one morning after decades without contact, needing a place for him and his brassy American girlfriend to stay for one night. Jocelyn spends the evening with them, but all the while is remembering both the passionate affair that brought her to Ireland to be with him and the devastating realities that drove her home to America. Of the four stories, this is perhaps the most readable and well paced, while the final tale, “Fine Arts,” is probably the clumsiest.
Still, all four novellas are interesting explorations of self-identity and the expectations of others, place and displacement, and the challenge of big ideas and even bigger personalities.
Written in a serious manner, with only occasional moments of levity, THE LIAR'S WIFE is a meaty and thoughtful book. Readers looking for action or fast-paced narrative will not find that here: these are stories told in memory and questions by characters still moved by encounters and ideas that shaped them in pivotal moments. Wordy and poignant, emotional and insightful, this is a demanding and often difficult work of fiction from the talented Mary Gordon.
Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
An Intriguing Quartet
By Roger Brunyate
One of the characters in this collection of four long stories or short novellas (around 70 pages each) has devised a means of communicating with the handicapped that involves the person selecting the one object from a set of four that does not match the other three. I find myself applying the principle to Mary Gordon’s stories, each more enjoyable than the one before, whose unity I can sense but not exactly define. So here goes.
Might it be the title story, with which the book opens? It is the only one whose ostensible action involves characters in their seventies rather than their twenties, although the important things happen in flashback to fifty years earlier. Jocelyn is a timid woman in her seventies, living alone in Connecticut while her husband is away. She gets a surprise visit from her first husband, Johnny Shaughnessy, an Irish singer she had loved madly in her twenties. At first it seems there is no comparison between her manicured life and that of this superannuated troubadour and his blowsy partner, playing the bar circuit as “Dixie and Dub.” But by the time the story is over, the moral balance will have shifted, and beautifully so.
Or is it “Simone Weill in New York” that is the odd one? Like all the others, it features a young person in her twenties learning lessons that will change the rest of her life, but here the main focus is elsewhere. Genevieve is a Frenchwoman married to a New York doctor. On Riverside Drive, in 1942, she runs into the philosophy teacher from her high school in Le Puy, Simone Weill. Unwell, ill-dressed, and eccentric, the Christian-Jewish philosopher and humanitarian is desperately trying to get parachuted back into occupied France. But although Weill is the secondary character, it is the fascination with her life and the religious and moral questions that she raises that make the main reasons for reading this extraordinarily accomplished and subtle story.
The title character in “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” turns out to be little more that a catalyst. What makes the story different from the rest is that its protagonist/narrator, Bill Morton, is a man. He is selected by the faculty of the Horace Mann High School in Gary to host the (fictitious) visit of the great German writer in 1939, when he spoke about the dangers of the Nazi regime. But it is less what Mann said (on other occasions, if not this one) that is of interest, so much as Bill’s personal and political awakening, which will affect the rest of his long life.
The twentyish protagonist in the final story, “Fine Arts,” is a doctoral student in Art History at Yale visiting Lucca in Italy in connection with her proposed dissertation on the sculptor Matteo Civitali. A naïve innocent in the ways of the world, Theresa Riordan has been basically nurtured by nuns until arriving at Yale. Her delayed coming-of-age story takes several interesting turns before reaching its unexpected ending, which clearly sets it apart from the other three, which close, as it were, with ellipses rather than a period or exclamation point. But Theresa’s experiences of Italy were so like my own as an art-historical student fifty years earlier that I was rooting for her all along, and more than ready to cheer at the end.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Delicate stories dealing with big issues
By Laurie A. Brown
“The Liar’s Wife” is only one of the four novellas in this book. Veteran writer Gordon has produced stories where the protagonists are all knocked out of their comfort zones and find themselves contemplating life changing moral issues.
In the first, the title story, a 70-some year old woman is surprised by the appearance of her ex-husband. They were only married a short time before she fled, unable to settle into a life in Ireland with a musician husband who, of course, lies continually. Her life has been comfortable; happy children, career she liked, good husband, three houses. His has been the opposite, but he feels he’s lived life to the fullest. Whose life has been better? Has one been a waste?
In “Simone Weil in New York” the protagonist is a young woman who was one of Weil’s students in France. Now married to an American doctor who is stationed in the Pacific Theater during WW 2, with a baby and living with her brother, she encounters Weil in the street. She is not happy to see her; she represents all that has been lost because of the war. As a student she had loved and revered Weil; now she feels a tangle of feelings. Weil feels an obligation to live as the poorest live; does that help anyone? Should Genevieve feel guilty for being safe in America instead of being part of the French Resistance? Can she break free of Weil’s philosophy?
The narrator in “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” is an old man, looking back on his life. The high point of his life was when, in high school, he was selected to present the visiting Thomas Mann to the school. Mann has left Germany because of the Nazi regime and is visiting the school to lecture on what is happening in Germany. Like Weil, Mann cannot enjoy his own freedom and success because of guilt over what is going on in his native country; this opens the high school boy’s eyes to the racism that is so casually accepted in America- so casually that no one ever really sees it.
My favorite story is the last one, “Fine Arts”. A college student who has been given a grant to go overseas to study the work of sculptor Citivali for her doctoral thesis. Theresa has had a hard life; her childhood was taken up with caring for a bed ridden father; her teens taken up with studying. Her one indulgence has been an affair with her married mentor, who is a self absorbed ass. Two of the sculptures that she wishes to study are in a private collection; the owner turns Theresa’s life upside down and completely reverses her situation.
All four protagonists wrestle with moral issues. Is what they are doing worthwhile? Are they wasting their lives? Is it all right to enjoy your life while others suffer? It sounds grim, but the stories are very engaging and thought provoking without being heavy. The prose is so… perfect… that it just leads you on into the stories.
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