Reading Note:
Florence Gordon
29 September 2014
Not since Wotan and Siegfried, I think, have I seen such a magnificently single-minded fight as the one that builds to its oblique but resonating climax in Florence Gordon, the new novel by Brian Morton.
For a few days after it arrived, I regarded Florence Gordon with trepidation. I wasn’t feeling well, and in fact was sunk in a depressed fug that might make the novel unpalatable, just as it did almost any kind of food put in front of me. I brandished this fear as a good reason for not picking up Florence Gordon straight away. But there was a deeper fear: what if I didn’t like it? What if it didn’t stand up to Morton’s three other great novels, Starting Out in the Evening, A Window Across the River, and, for me the greatest of them all, Unbreakable You?
Fairly soon, the fear of a reading mind soured by depression was obliged to dissipate: I felt tired, but basically normal. I had just galloped through Pride and Prejudice — you’d have thought that I hadn’t read it (many times) before and didn’t know how it came out. Of course, it’s knowing precisely how “it comes out” that makes the long (but briskly paced) ride from pride and prejudice to love and marriage so exquisitely suspenseful: I was savoring the obstacles strewn in front of Lizzie and Darcy at the same time that I wanted to sweep them away. When an almost Arcadian resolution threatened to end the story in the early chapters of the third volume, I was perversely delighted that the course of high romance was about to be diverted into the white-water rapids of Lydia’s elopement. I wanted to be out of breath when Darcy renewed his proposal, within pages of the end, and Jane Austen did not disappoint. I have never enjoyed Pride and Prejudice half as much, nor read it with such breathless speed.
I was particularly struck by the virtuosity of the chapter in which Lizzie, having read it, considers Darcy’s self-exculpating letter, and reconsiders all her old prejudices. This cascade of epiphanies might easily have been either tedious or histrionic, but Austen’s construction, with realization leading to realization, is a triumph of narrated reflection.
For the matter of that, Pride and Prejudice might have been a very hard act to follow.
Swallowing deeply, I opened Florence Gordon. The first chapter, which didn’t even fill a page, was a reminder that frankness in women is likely to be dismissed as strident and shrill — wry, but familiar. The second chapter, however (not quite three times longer than the first), ended thus:
So she was a strong proud independent-minded woman who accepted being old but nevertheless felt essentially young.
She was also, in the opinion of many who knew her, even in the opinion of many who loved her, a complete pain in the neck.
I grinned with pleasure.
The woman in question is, of course, Florence Gordon, a formidable 75 year-old feminist who basically “wants to be left alone to read, write, and think.” (That won my vote, and I’m still in my sixties.) We discover her on the verge of finding a way to write her memoirs, the kind of distinctive viewpoint that alone will save her efforts from tumbling into an accretion of names and dates. She is happy; she is alone in her apartment — but her old friend Vanessa keeps calling. Florence, beginning to worry about Vanessa, takes the sixth call. One thing leads to another, but quickly, and by the end of the fourth chapter, Florence has done something that in another person might be denounced as intolerably rude. Instead, it is Florence at her worst best. After the brief interruption, Florence returns to her laptop and her memoirs, relieved to find that she has not lost the precious thread. Young people who read this book will howl indignantly at Florence’s apparently anti-social behavior, but perhaps they will learn from their discussions that, for an older person, a pleasant surprise is not sufficiently different from an unpleasant one to warrant the “thoughtful” and “well-meant” efforts.
Florence Gordon is not, however, about Florence Gordon only. Among the several narrative strands, there is one that does indeed focus solely on Florence, but it has nothing to do with her memoirs or her writing career or her personal history or a burst of sudden fame. Instead, it is ominously signaled early on: “There was something wrong with her balance. Her left foot kept flapping or flopping or something.” As Florence learns more about this apparent disorder, she ever more resolutely determines to keep it to herself, and in this, although much besieged toward the end of the novel, she is successful. There is a gleaming heroism in Florence’s stubbornness. I should never think of emulating it myself, but I’m convinced that it makes sense for her — that it is, indeed, her only viable option. Morton is to be commended for his humane treatment of this material, treating it as lightly as if it were pie crust.
As I say, though, Florence Gordon has a larger story to tell. It is a story familiar from Morton’s other “Upper West Side” novels, but treated, as before, in an entirely new way. The familiar aspect of the story is simply this: people who grow up to be fiercely independent and curmudgeonly intellectuals often turn out to have been ordinary enough in youth to marry and to have children. These children naturally grow up with an understandable resentment that takes the intellectual life, with its books and ideas and blithe disregard for the inner lives of others, as its target. In Florence’s case, the child is Daniel, now 47 and a “cop.” An experimental poet in adolescence, Daniel found the courage to sign up for the army, and after that unpleasant experience (from which he learned, however, that all men might indeed be equal, no matter how smart they were or how well-read), he became a policeman in Seattle, eventually settingly into a Crisis Intervention unit — a social worker with a badge, in most real cops’ view. Daniel is thinking of retiring and taking up some other line of work.
A partial catalyst for change is the grant that his wife, Janine, has received. This takes Janine to Columbia University for a stint in a psychology lab headed by a student of Walter Mischel, the man who devised the famous “marshmallow” test. Janine, who grew up in the suburbs of New York, soon finds that she might not be able to leave, so strong is the spell of Gotham life. Before we learn what Janine does for a living, we’re told that she was an ardent fan of Florence Gordon in college, reading much of her work with awe. When, on their third date, she discovered that Florence was Daniel’s mother, “she couldn’t believe it.” This phrase is repeated on the next page; it conveys a certain stunned response that Janine as never quite overcome. Needless to say, Florence has never encouraged her daughter-in-law’s enthusiasm. In a very funny passage, she (privately) makes savage fun of the detailed questions with which, in the early days of their acquaintance, Janine pestered her mother-in-law. Janine has come to understand that spending time with Florence is always unpleasant, if always in a new and unexpected way.
Janine and Daniel are both, then, adrift in a confusion that is somewhere between “up in the air” and full-blown mid-life crisis. The counterpoint of Florence Gordon plays the aimlessness of the middle-aged parents against the growing clarity gained by their ageing mother and their maturing daughter. Janine and Daniel don’t know what they really want; they have outgrown their youthful dreams. Florence and her granddaughter, in contrast, not only know what they want but are sharp students of how to get it.
This granddaughter is Emily, a bright and curious woman who knows very little about the world beyond what she has been taught in school or shown on television. Emily has discontentedly dropped out of Oberlin College and come to live with her mother, while she works at a bookshop and tries to sort out her future. It does not take long for Florence to enlist Emily as a research assistant; the surprise is that Florence really does treat Emily as if she were a complete stranger, but one to be watched for exploiting her family relationship to take liberties. Florence’s expressions of gratitude for Emily’s more-than-competent work are rare and bizarrely oblique. It will take Emily years to see them for what they were.
Here, alas, I must stop. I should love nothing more than to type out and share the extraordinary final passages of Florence Gordon, but nothing could induce me to spoil the pleasure of discovering it in context. I will confine my gush to pointing out that the presentation of the novel in short chapters — 111 of them in 306 pages — makes for a fine weave that greatly enhances the social nature of the Gordon family; and to quoting two lines that will underscore the point with which I began this entry.
Emily looked enraged. She had the light of battle in her eyes.
What a magnificent girl, Florence thought.
But did not, of course, say.