A Mass for the Dead

by William Gibson

This is written in remembrance of Gibson's deceased parents and in honor of their lives. In reflecting on them he in turn makes it a tribute to parenthood and a dedication to his own children. Gibson's language is striking in its poignancy. Despite the title, this is not a religious work, but a work of love from a child to parent and from the child-become-parent to his own children. Interspersed between the reminiscences of his parents and his childhood, Gibson inserts achingly beautiful epistles to his children for their guidance about life and parenting.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Biography

431 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

William Gibson was a Tony Award-winning American playwright and novelist. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1938.

Gibson's most famous play is The Miracle Worker (1959), the story of Helen Keller's childhood education, which won him the Tony Award for Best Play after he adapted it from his original 1957 telefilm script. He adapted the work again for the 1962 film version, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay; the same actresses who previously had won Tony Awards for their performances in the stage version, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, received Academy Awards for the film version as well.

Reviews

[Laryssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book with a heavy writing style that takes a lot of time to get through. This is my third attempt in the last 15 years to read this book, so finishing it feels like a real accomplishment. I admit that while I will try not to conflate my excitement at finishing this book with the actual nature of its content, I might a little.

In short, this is William Gibson’s family chronicle. It is mostly focused on his parents, but there are lots of details about his grandparents as well as his aunts and uncles. However, this book is so much more than that. Written beautifully, it is also William Gibson’s meditation on the gifts and sorrows of life, a reckoning with his flawed human nature, and a way to honor those that have come before him.

In a way, Gibson’s Mass For the Dead (and it is segmented in the structure of a mass) is an invitation for us to reflect on our own family legacy. And it is emotional.

I loved it. I think for years to come, I will ponder this book.

[Seán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family history/memoir as high art. The order of the book is inspired by the order of the funeral Mass, and through this brilliant structuring of poetry and prose Gibson unspools his family's story. This really should be a much better known book.

Post-gay Warning: you will cry, boy. Yes, you will.

Excerpts:

Have mercy upon us, saith the missal: that outcry of woe, is it anything but the primal wail to let us live? live in the hour of the flesh, another minute another mercy, and in the hour of its death emigrate into eternity with undamaged wits. In a prayer I had by heart when I was as green as my boys I pledged my somewhat inexperienced belief in the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. In my orphaned forties I walked again in the church my mother had christened me in, and sat alone amid its acre of pews below dim lamps on long chains in a quietude which was a simulacrum of God's mind; high in this alabaster skull, birdlike above the altar, hung a replica of the carcass they said was his beloved son, crucified, sword-pierced and naked, but clad in a monstrous dream of triumph over death. It was this dream which had reared a thousand hundred thousand such temples around the graveyard of our planet, like lookout towers for some afterlife, and brought mankind to its knees in them, that death might be a beginning.

...

Holy, holy, the earth indeed is filled with thy glory, though the graves are lost, and I can tell their tales only in my own, but where and who is the begetting trunk? ... [O:]ur oldest patriarch was in his time too only a twig on a tree like none known on this planet, whose married torsos divide as they descend, multiplying as prodigally downward as upward, into all humanity, air plants never rooting in terra firma; for homeland and anchorage there is none, the stability of the tree is in its interlocking of limbs, man to wife, mother to babe at nipple, grandfather to toddler in hand, and all that multivarious yoking of boles in antiquity to twiglets in time to come, rooted in nothing, is purposeless, its own beginning and end. The ancestral juice that nurtured the crowds of children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren somehow kept alive in migrations, famines, pogroms, epidemics, wars, is one with the flow from the arms of my parents, through me, to the skinny arms of my sons. Sprig of this bottomless forest, I no less than any am the begetting trunk.

[Kathy Kattenburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pouring out of feeling and memory by William Gibson, the author of "The Miracle Worker," about his mother and father, their relationship with each other and his with them, and the vast welter of relatives, living and dead, who formed and created his memories and his sensibilities. It has a different feel, a different ethos, to it than any other memoir I've read -- it's suffused with a spirituality, a yearning that goes beyond mere family history. Our lives are made of mundane nothings, and we only appreciate how extraordinary those banalities are after they are gone forever.

Gibson's writing style is oblique and intricate, but not dry; in fact, it's highly poetic, and a pleasure to read, albeit challenging at times.

[Betty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I purchased this edition in 1996 from a catalog of the now long defunct Common Reader. For some years, this was my source for fine reading. Intimidated by the writing style, it took me some 25 years and a quarantine to find again. The prose is heavy going, as if he didn’t want it accessible. Formulated as a liturgy, its theme is the inescapable voyage of life to death. Both happen day by day, slow changes to a final end. Among other meditations, he faces his teen age hubris, recognition coming as he becomes a parent. And he also takes the reader through the difficult last days of his parents. A book to reflect on.

[Beth]

Heavy reading, every sentence is a concise work of art. This book will take me a long time to finish.
Have to be in the mood to concentrate completely on his writing style.

[Partridge Public]

Gibson, William

[Paulette · Rating 4 out of 5]

liked the book

[Annie Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a fan. This book was too fragmented for my liking.