The Other Side

by Mary Gordon

Both Ellen and Vincent left Ireland in the early part of this century, one bitterly escaping shame, humiliation, and fear; the other filled with hope for the promise and future of America - the "other side." Together for more than sixty years, they raised a family, savored their dreams, comforted, challenged, and defied one another. Their desires and fears are manifest in the generations that follow - children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, each carrying as a legacy of the past the need to find a true place in the family and in the world at large.

As she writes of passage and change, of the struggle of generations to find a common ground, Mary Gordon reveals that the dramas wrought by social and cultural forces can be resolved only in the realm of the heart.

Genres: Fiction, Irish Literature, Historical Fiction, American, Family, Contemporary, Novels

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Mary Catherine Gordon is an American writer from Queens and Valley Stream, New York. She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author of New York.

Reviews

[Virginia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 The tone of this novel is somber from beginning to end, but moments of beauty—not joy so much—occur in the lives of the characters. The book has hard truths to share—that tragic elements of one generation visit themselves on the next and the next, that people have feelings other than those they strive to have, and that our individual lives are more repetitive than otherwise. Gordon deftly penetrates each character’s internal life, as in describing Marilyn’s futile attempt to converse with her brother in the course of a family reunion of sorts: “Go on, she tells herself. Go on to something else. But what? Like a roulette wheel, her mind spins blindly. Can she bring something to rest, a topic, an idea that won’t cause him anger or remorse? Her brother, like a burn victim, must be approached with care. Only a few intact spots can be touched.” Unlike many novelists, she completes each character’s story before moving on. Reading this novel is an immersion in familial bleakness. But having read it feels like having done something substantial.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I confess I could not finish this book. It all takes place on one day at the deathbed of an Irish immigrant. What takes place? Not a darn thing except that each character wallows in all the sadness and perceived injustice of his/her life. Spare me.

[Carol Storm · Rating 1 out of 5]

Everything in this book depends on whether or not you can stomach the protagonist, Ellen Macnamara. Ellen is an Irish girl who comes to America around 1890, marries, starts a large family. She is also cruel, selfish, consumed with rage and prone to enormous self pity. I can't imagine where Mary Gordon found the inspiration for a female protagonist as thoroughly unpleasant as this. She really seems to know her so intimately!

Problem is, aside from the hateful, overbearing nature of the main character, there are a lot of details that just don't ring true. Mary Gordon loves to whine about how tough the Irish had it, (toiling away in those cotton fields, being lynched, you know) yet she's so insufferably genteel that she can't bear to actually show Ellen in grinding poverty. So Ellen works as a "seamstress" and finds employment with a very wealthy Irish family. Problem is, even there, Mary can't seem to hit the right note of persecution. The lady of the house asks Ellen to help her with some sewing, and says something like, "here, sit down and help me with this sewing, and while you do it, tell me something about your life." Supposed to be cruel and overbearing, but comes across as gracious and rather sweet. And this was as bad as it got for Ellen? No wonder she's mean all the time! Uh, I am not convinced. I never bought her as poor, angry, or in any way representative of the huddled masses.

Later on, Ellen gets work in a "sweatshop" (though she never seems to sweat) and makes friends with a -- gasp! -- Jewish girl. No Italians or Poles for Barnard Mary -- oh no. Well, okay, so the Jewish girl and the Irish girl meet, at the sweatshop, and it's love at first sight. Problem is, the two hold elegant conversations in Barnard English, chatting about Jane Austen and so on. Something tells me that two working girls in New York in 1910 would have less than perfect diction. Ellen should have a brogue you could cut and the Jewish girl should have an accent all her own. But it doesn't happen. Mary wants to cry about the immigrant experience . . . but she doesn't want to experience it.

Through the years, the unreality grows. Ellen becomes a feared and respected matriarch, ruling over a miserable clan she tyrannizes with her razor sharp tongue. Supposedly. But when the police come to the door to reprimand her for keeping chickens in the yard, she crushes the young patrolman with a feeble crack like "I remember when you and my Johnny used to climb apple trees together." Wow! Move over, Don Rickles. Ellen just never comes to life as a tyrant, a rebel, or anything else Mary Gordon wants her to be.

Not only does Mary Gordon never make Ellen real, she never deals with any of the more unpleasant sides of the Irish character. Racism, anti-Semitism, violence against outsiders, none of these things are even hinted at. Mary wants it both ways -- the Irish are victims, out of place in America, yet somehow they rise to wealth and respectability without ever getting their hands dirty.

Back in 1989, Mary actually lowered herself to appearing on the TODAY show to promote this dog, and I remember her saying that she wasn't interested in the "mini-series" version of the immigrant experience. But it's not clear why this book is any better. It's not more insightful, there is no self-criticism, and the characters aren't especially charismatic.

But at least Ellen speaks correct, Barnard English.

[Susan Beecher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very powerful novel about family and the very different feelings of different members of the same family. The descriptions of life back in Ireland leading the two main characters to emigrate to the U.S. were fascinating.

[Adrienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, the characters are mostly unlikable but I found the thoughts of the family members to be authentic and truthful. I found the writing well done and even though it wasn’t inspiring, I’m glad I read it at the recommendation of a beloved friend.

[Bookguide · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am in two minds about this book. On the one hand, it was well-written, and I enjoyed reading at least half of the book, hoping that by the end, either some mystery or secret from the past would be revealed, or something would actually happen in the present. Unfortunately, it just dragged on with more of the same psyco-analysis of the family members. The worst thing about it was that almost everybody was miserable, and those who weren't so by nature were dragged down by the rest. Those who might have escaped to happiness (Cam and Ira) were held back from actually telling each other how they felt, as they both thought that the other liked the way it was, and Cam was also held back by the expectations of the family. In fact, if only the whole family had spent more time actually communicating with each other instead of second-guessing, they all would have been happier. Another thing that struck me was that each generation thinks that it is easier for both the previous and the following generations; the great-parents think that life is so much easier for the youngsters because they have more freedom of choice, the youngest generation thinks it must have been easier when you did what you had to do, with no decisions to be made. And the middle generations are stuck in the middle, worrying about upsetting their parents and disappointing their children. In the meantime, everybody is so busy trying (and often failing) to please everyone else, that nobody is actually happy.

Some of the writing was beautiful, and a few passages resonated with me, so I'm going to write them here so I can look back at them sometime.
p.180 - hate: "What is between them - hate - flourishes at the sound of Theresa's first word. It unfolds, like a paper flower in water. It exfoliates, intricately, as if touched by some seasonal impulse. It unrolls and throws itself out like a bolt of cloth. It grows in its extent: familiar, useful, interesting. This hate began for Cam in childhood. Theresa attached her hate to a still-growing child. Ancestral, it would go on, and it would be passed down. There would be no end to it."
p.198 - dusting: "If you had an idea in your head, or an interest worth a shilling in the world, you wouldn't have the time to be behind me with a dustcloth." That's a motto I should have hung on my fridge!

And finally, here's a bookish quote on p. 14:
"Vincent and Ellen read hungrily, desperately, stealing time from something, needing to know something: the nature of the world. Only Cam and Dan read for pleasure. Reading was a smooth ribbon of road stretching before them. They could follow it at their leisure, or race down it, dizzily and rushed... When they were reading they didn't want to be doing anything else. The knew this was unlike other children. It was the secret mark that first bound them; it had to be kept secret - from other children, from most adults - particularly in summer, when they were expectd to want to do something else: climb trees, run play ball, look in puddles for the signs of life."

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book encapsulates the Irish Catholic (of which I am) mentality perfectly! Life is hard and if it isn’t then I’m not a good Catholic! A book revolving around character studies of the 4 generations of An Irish-American Catholic family from the early 1900’s through the 1980’s. The story takes place over one day when a multigenerational family gathers to welcome their patriarch back from rehab to his home where his dementia suffering wife is dying. Although the span of the book is one day, the reminiscing of the characters fill in the family’s lives over 70 years.
Now, be warned, it isn’t a sunny book, very depressing and most characters are totally unlikable.
If you’re expecting Angela’s Ashes, it doesn’t have the humour! But that said, it shows the folly of not being honest to both yourself and those you’re supposed to be closest to you.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

I once read a tweet from a YA fan who claimed that YA was all about having adventures and overthrowing dystopian regimes while adult fic was all about deciding whether or not to cheat on your spouse. At the time that pissed me off, but then I read this book and realized this is precisely what they were talking about. A neverending wallow in the minutiae of dysfunctional family relations. What a miserable slog.

Also, why are people tagging this as Irish Literature? This book is American. Irish Literature is from Ireland.

[Stephen Paul Chase, Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Bamboozlepig · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too many characters, too little plot. Switches between past and present are confusing. Noped it out of this one when my head started spinning, trying to keep everyone and their relationship within the novel straight.

[Carolyn Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about the complex relationships in a family that was dominated by a strong and sometimes abrasive protagonist. The writing style was engaging.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book because the characters are flawed.....which makes them real. It would be great to find more books that have more 'real' characters. Looking forward to another book by Mary Gordon.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a bunch of miserable people.

[Chiara Coletti · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never has so much been written about so little.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have owned this book for a while; many years ago I had read some of Mary Gordon's other books and really enjoyed them. As I started this this book and well into the first half, I wondered if my tastes had changed so much. But Gordon came through in the end. The Other Side is the story of the extended MacNamara family, beginning with Vincent and Ellen, both Irish immigrants, who met and married in New York. The parts about their lives in Ireland and what prompted them to come to the US were fascinating. However, the story is really about Ellen and Vincent and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. No one is without issues or really very happy. But they are living those lives, bound to their families, getting by. All of the characters have both good and bad traits. Vincent and Ellen are old now, dying and some of the story is told through flashbacks on moments in their lives.

"Neither of them had believed much in change. You are who your are, they'd always said. But were you? Who was Ellen now? He had to admit, she's changed. But has her change changed him? Does it mean he isn't the person he has been? Who, then, is he?" (176)

"On the boat he remembers the promise of the first trip over and the hopes. He looks back at his life in America. Good luck. Jobs, a wife. Children. But it is built on nothing. He's been made a fool of. It was all for nothing. She'd used him. The woman he had loved had never loved him. She'd have married any man she thought that she could fool." (201)

"He knows two things: that he did not describe it to her, and that she gave him no comfort. What did that mean about the things he could not have told her? Did it mean that there was nothing between them? Only living beside each other for a long time in a house? Perhaps it meant he could have lived with any woman. Or was it Ellen's scornfulness that kept him from telling things to her, that made him keep things to himself? Did it mean she'd never loved him? Or that he had not loved her? How did you live beside a person and not say things?" (224)

"You're just like all the goddamn Irish. You like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. You like standing for something better than being something." (299)

This book was about family relationships and secrets. I have often thought (and said) that no one really knows about a marriage, except the two people in it.

I was glad that the author put a family chart in the front, naming all the character and their relationships. I referred to it often.

My edition was not the one shown here. It is a hardback edition, published in 1989 by Viking.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary Gordon once described reading Henry James as eating a chocolate cake -- the writing is so rich that you have to read slowly and savor each bite, otherwise you might feel sick if you go too fast and try to ingest it all at once. Her own writing in this book might be described more like a giant bowl of double-fudge brownie ice cream smothered in hot fudge: what's amazing in theory is overkill in practice. Each sentence is decadently crafted to literary perfection, but the book is a 300-page character study where not all that much happens. Which is to say that although she transitions fairly seamlessly between time periods and the viewpoints of a good dozen or so characters, sometimes mid-paragraph, the plot takes too long and inches forward in the present, moment by moment, so that the climactic scene melts into a giant ice cream soup of thoughts and feelings and actions running together -- it's sweet, with all the ingredients of something one seemingly should like, but ultimately not wholly satisfying.

[Sarah R · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first novel by Mary Gordon.
The author unabashedly pulls back the curtain on a family enduring a transformational event. Death. We flinch back as we peak in on this family, afraid to recognize reflections of our own families/selves within the tight grouping of mourners.

An Irish Catholic, psychological drama surrounding a pit of self-loathing vipers. Who blame everything and everyone for their life problems. Immediately feeling shame. Then immediately feeling anger. Then immediately finding a family member to pin it all on and torture with their withheld love, sympathy, care, and concern. Emotional Intelligence isn't a thing with this starved and aggravated family of aggressive antagonists. Each page is an agony of memory.

The Theme expands outward from a single, elderly woman and her husband....each with memories that carry indescribable grief.
The author writes in an almost disjointed, clipped style that I found interesting because I recognize it must be quite difficult. The author successfully pulls this off. I remain impressed and also feel like asking for my time back after finishing this novel;) The ending....really? I wished for more closure. I was emotionally invested in these pathetic, intelligent, divergent, specimens.


I hesitate to recommend.....you almost have to be the right person, at the right time, reading with the right type of mindset to understand this novel. Otherwise, you'll wonder why any of these family members didn't just end up killing each other by the end of the book.
They're gross, twisted, animalistic, cruel, multifaceted human beings....and I suppose, really, that that is the whole point.
How would you remember your entire life, back to front, and all of your regrets, if you were strapped down and dying...
Is life all about Nurture....or Nature...
And what would you do, to hide what you consider to be your biggest "shame"...?

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

1989. She writes very well, is psychologically very astute about her characters.

The repetition got to me, about the elderly man [patriarch of the family, tho he certainly did not see himself that way] the author tells us he did not want to go back home [from the nursing home where he was recovering from a broken leg]. Fine. Then she says the same sentence every time the focus moves back to that man. Like, I already know he doesn't want to go home, I remember, OK?

But I think repetition is part of her style, and to some extent that's OK.
I guess I did not feel there was any character I could at all empathize with let alone identify with. Though nearly every character has loads of sad stories that make me feel sorry for them. And the sad stories are definitely believable, it's not that.

Not a book to read for pleasure.

One of the themes seems to be that people don't let anyone else know how they really feel inside. They keep that to themselves. And how different life could be if people would open up more to each other. But how a parent can make it to dangerous for a child to open up, so it's all too clear _why_ such people do not open up more...

We get little glimpses of life in small town Ireland around 1900, and of Irish immigrant life in New York in the early 1900s. And a little bit on the birth of some unions in NYC.

[Candy Wood]

The trouble with novels told through multiple perspectives is that wherever they end, someone will be left out. The title of this one refers to the journey Vincent and Ellen both made from Ireland to “the other side” of the Atlantic before 1922, but the shifting perspectives emphasize that for each of the characters in this four-generation family, there’s another side. Vincent and Ellen have been married over 60 years, not without conflict, and their children and grandchildren (two of whom are divorce lawyers) have not achieved such lengthy relationships. All of them would like to be happy but seem compelled to make the choices that lead to unhappiness: if one family member finds happiness, it would be at the expense of others, and the admirable characters won’t accept that. Several of them consider just walking away but then don’t, and I might have enjoyed the novel more if they had.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh -- didn't bother to read much of this. The writing had potential, hence the two stars, but nothing else was keeping my interest. I think it was the timing; after When Madeline Was Young A Novel, the last thing I wanted to read was another description-heavy book where not much happens. Good writing is necessary, but unless you're a poetry fan (which I am not), it's not sufficient in and of itself. I ended up sneaking in a trip to Sefer ve-Sefel and will hopefully be writing some happier reviews soon...

[Jessica Lynne Gardner · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had potential. The premise was interesting, the characterization was engaging and the plot was complex but the novel was bogged down with too many irrelevant details and a mind-boggling family tree. My edition did not have a family tree printed inside so I had to draw my own but the Penguin edition did because they must have realized the ridiculousness of trying to keep up with the characters without one. This should have been done as three or four separate books, all about one or two characters, instead of trying to cram fourteen characters' lives into 385 pages. There are also more grammar and spelling errors than I expected out of a novel chosen for college.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. This reminded me of when Maeve Binchy writes a book with one unifying plot but a chapter per character so that no one gets real development - an interesting concept of generations gathering together, showing the change of times and the different complex ties of family yap yap yap and it was pretty well written but I found it too complicated to follow who was whom and how they were all related and would've enjoyed just delving into one or two of them.

[Bill Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author Mary Gordon produces some beautiful prose, I must say. But I found the book depressing and couldn't wait to get done with it, which is unlike me as a reader. Spending so many hours inside the heads of the universally dysfunctional members of this Irish-American family just got to be too much. There was not a single likable or empathetic character. There was no light, no hope, no resolution. And therefore, I was disappointed.

[Syd · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was well written and had incredible character development, but it was ALL character development. Sloooooooow. I have to admit that I loved the bits that took place in Ireland because I could picture Cork, the church by the bay, and the "deck of cards" houses so perfectly having recently been there.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book about an Irish immigrant family and the very different histories of the two parents in Ireland. From the beginning, though, it's fairly depressing. The difficulties of aging are portrayed relentlessly.

[Peg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A story of passage and change, of immigration from Ireland, displacement, and of the struggle of families to find a common ground between generations.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mary Gordon is a great story teller but she portrays her characters so intently that you know them better than your own relatives.

[Byron · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fuck this book. Hated it so much. Not even sure what the cover is supposed to look like because I have a used hardback version.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary Gordon knows families. This book focuses more on the hurts and rivalries in families than feels good, but is not unrealistic.

[Tim Nason · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read to page 32 but the story bogged down in endless review and summary with no characterization, dialog, scenery or liveliness.