Pearl

October 18, 2004
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.

September 15, 2004
On Christmas Day, Maria Meyers is informed that her pearl of a daughter is protesting violence in Ireland and elsewhere by chaining herself to a Dublin flagpole and refusing to eat. Maria leaps into action, but what should her action be? With a seven-city author tour.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2004
It's Christmas in New York in 1998, and Maria hopes to hear from her daughter, Pearl, who is studying in Ireland. But Pearl has been on a prolonged hunger strike and has now chained herself to a flagpole outside the American embassy. By the time Maria and her closest friend, Joseph, arrive in Dublin, Pearl is in the hospital, and the piquant narrator, who confesses an inability to influence the course of events, steps in to provide the background for this trio of complicated people of conscience, each forced by Pearl's desperate protest to confront the past. Maria remembers her privileged Catholic upbringing, her activist days, and Pearl's father, a Cambodian doctor who was most likely killed by the Khmer Rouge. Joseph, the housekeeper's son and heir to Maria's father's religious art business, faces his failure to live a life of his own design. Pearl, who never knew her father and whose involvement with IRA sympathizers led to her near-suicide, grapples with the question of how to live with the knowledge that we routinely do each other violent harm. As for Gordon, she outdoes herself. All of her books are exquisite and penetrating, but in this riveting novel, her compelling characters and their spiritual quandaries, her profound inquiries into beauty, compassion, and forgiveness, and the sheer radiance of her prose are surpassingly suspenseful, brilliant, and affecting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)