The Liar's Wife

June 15, 2014
Fans of the author will welcome these four novellas for their familiar themes and rich characters.Gordon (The Love of My Youth, 2011, etc.) visits familiar territory from her 36 years of fiction, criticism and memoirs: faith sustained or lost, father figures and mentors, unreliable lovers and the power that two people exert or inflict on each other. For this collection, the pull of the past figures prominently. A former student of Simone Weil meets the French philosopher in New York in 1942 and is confused to encounter a brilliant intellect now imbued with mysticism and life-saving schemes and questions her own choice of family over career. In Fine Arts, a graduate student eases her path to scholarly achievement by sleeping with her married mentor. After he breaks it off, she discovers the beauty in her chosen artist's work in Lucca, Italy, and acquires a fairy-tale benefactor. A 90-year-old man remembers himself as a callow high schooler in Gary, Indiana, chosen to introduce Thomas Mann at a lecture in 1939 and learning about imported cheese, literature and Nazi atrocities. In the title story, the best of these novellas, a wealthy elderly woman is visited in New Canaan, Connecticut, by the husband she ran from 50 years earlier. It begins with the nicely drawn fear and vulnerability aroused by a strange truck parked near her house. It's the old beau's van, and his surprise visit sparks memories of a time when love took her with him to his crowd in Ireland. There, his small lies led to a bigger one, amid other things that weren't what they seemed. In retrospect, though, she wonders what she lost by fleeing home to safety and certainty.What Gordon sometimes lacks in subtlety is often made up for by the passion and energy of a questioning mind made all the more vital as she ages with her characters.

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March 15, 2014
Past and present, Europe and America meet in this collection of four novellas from the incandescent Gordon. Simone Weil faces her death in New York City, Thomas Mann makes a difference to an American high school student, an American graduate student flees to Italy after a disastrous love affair, and a slippery-tongued Irish charmer shows us how to live. Just like a great Gordon novel times four; grab the reading group guide.

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Starred review from May 15, 2014
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 prot'g's. Two WWII tales offer disquieting views of prePearl 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)