Extreme passions, profound questions in 'Pearl'
Pearl
By Mary Gordon
Pantheon, 354 pp., $24.95
If Mary Gordon's eighth novel were nonfiction, it might be subtitled "Fifty Ways to Be a Martyr." This is not meant to be flip -- Gordon has written an absorbing, affecting tale of family bonds sundered and reknit. But the book's theme is martyrdom in its many guises. Each of the main characters has sacrificed painfully -- for religion, politics, art, love, or all four.
Pearl is the college-age daughter of the fiercely independent Maria Meyers, the true protagonist of the story despite the title. As the book opens, Pearl has staged a hunger strike while studying in Ireland, chaining herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy. It is less a political act than an effort to expiate a personal sin; the enigmatic statement she tapes near her body speaks of her "conviction that the most important thing I can do with my life is to offer it in witness." Just in case we miss the point, Gordon informs us that the word "witness" means "martyr" in Greek.
Maria, of course, rushes to Pearl's side, desperate to save her child and to make sense of the girl's radical act. The search for understanding sends Maria on a therapeutic journey through her own life, to Pearl's origins and her own.
Maria is the product of a strict Catholic upbringing, and its lessons haunt her despite her determined 1960s-era rebellion. Pearl is the love child of Maria and Ya-Katey, a Cambodian doctor whom she becomes involved with when he flees to New York to escape Pol Pot's killing fields. Through her political awakening, Maria thinks she is replacing religious belief with an abiding passion for justice, but the forces are interchangeable. Ya-Katey fears the purity of political fundamentalism; Maria fears but also seeks the purity of religious conviction. Pearl -- with her blond hair and incandescent name -- is just pure.
Like most of Gordon's novels, indeed like her own life, "Pearl" is soaked through with Catholicism. Readers of Gordon's memoir, "The Shadow Man," will find other autobiographical details as well. Maria's relationship with her father -- who converts from Judaism -- resonates with Gordon's own. Another character's mother is, as Gordon's was, lost to history behind a veil of dementia.
There are religious symbols and allegories marbleized throughout the book, and decoding them is one of its great pleasures. One finds parallels to the Easter story ("Her heart is like a stone . . . what if the stone could be rolled back?"); psychiatry serving as a contemporary stand-in for religion; a whole section titled "The Dubliners" that is homage to more than James Joyce; the idea of "passion" figuring heavily in all its meanings, from romantic ardor to martyred suffering. It may have been obvious to some readers, but it took me 250 pages before I realized that Pearl's mother and surrogate father are named Mary (Maria) and Joseph.
So is Pearl's story the story of Jesus? The book asks the question repeatedly: Are there not things worth dying for? If not, is anything worth living for? Pearl thinks to herself that her hunger strike will "turn my body into a sentence" that anyone can read -- albeit a death sentence. Isn't that the kind of lasting statement Jesus ensured by his own crucifixion?
One odd note in "Pearl" is the voice of the narrator, who is omniscient but not disinterested; she/he takes sides, makes jokes, shares the reader's puzzlement. The tone switches from the formal distance of the passive voice ("It was discovered that she had encephalitis") to conspiratorial to something like a harangue.
Near the end, the narration takes on a meditative, prayerful tone. Joseph wanders the streets of Dublin, confused and wracked with guilt that he could not have foreseen Pearl's hunger strike. In a rush, all of the novel's ideas come tumbling together.
"A pure gesture, he thinks, has no excess. He has suffered from the ideal of purity, but he would not have given it up." And: "He has always thought of Pearl as pure, a white flower hidden in a cool sheath of green leaves. Did she think she was emptying herself of all excess? Did this emptying mean she would become one of the dead?" Eventually, Joseph comes unraveled in an improbable scene that verges on the melodramatic.
In fact, all the characters in "Pearl" are exaggerated, outsize, their sufferings nearly biblical in scale. Any one of the traumas that Maria and Joseph endure in their youth would put an ordinary person on the couch -- or in the confessional -- for years. Perhaps the characters' agony must be this intense to equal the powerful force of their ultimate redemption. But one has to hope such extreme passions are not necessary to achieve serenity for ordinary mortals like the rest of us.
Rene Loth is the editor of the Globe's editorial page. 