Hermione Lee

Her Wise Voice and Her Eye for the Sad Truth

The Other Side

By

Bloomsbury 320pp £13.95 order from our bookshop

I admire Mary Gordon extremely: I think she has written some of the strongest American novels of domestic and religious feelings in the last dozen years. But The Other Side, I am very sorry to say, is not one of them. It has some brilliantly painful scenes. One or two characters well up to Gordonian standards of malevolent self-denial, and there is an interesting obsession with retribution in family life: the House of Atreus is frequently invoked. But I found it slow, diffuse, and over-populated. There are too many life-stories and too many adjectives.

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