Search Results

This chapter examines the influence of Vatican II on the works of American writer Mary Gordon. It states that Gordon was influenced by pre-Vatican II writer Flannery O'Connor and that she did not diverge from the path taken by O'Connor on the issue regarding the Catholic Church. Though Gordon shares O'Connor's purpose and methodological incongruity, her terms are different for she writes almost exclusively about Catholics. Vatican II has made it possible for Gordon to use Catholicism both as the subject she hopes to illuminate and as the light she uses to bring out its features.

This chapter examines five works about secrets and secrecy involving searches for fathers who, during the childhood of their sons or daughters, undertook to obscure if not erase their own identities: Mary Gordon's The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father; Germaine Greer's Daddy, We Hardly Knew You; Mike O'Connor's Crisis, Pursued By Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run; Joseph Lelyveld's Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop; and Michael Rips's The Face of a Naked Lady: An Omaha Family Mystery. All the fathers in these texts were dead at the time their children wrote about them. In one case, the father had helped solve the German “Enigma” code in World War II. One of the themes unifying these five texts is the adult children's discovery that the secrets have dominated not only the parents' lives but also their own. The writers veer between reconciliation and a residual bitterness at their findings, expressing both affection and resentment.

Eamonn Wall’s discussion of Irish American Catholic experience reveals many similarities on either side of the pond, and some differences also. The Irish American authors and commentators provide unique perspectives on many facets of Irish life, including the unique role played by the Catholic Church. Among the authors discussed are Frank McCourt, whose account of a poor Catholic childhood in Limerick is so memorably captured in the best-seller, Angela’s Ashes, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín and Mary Gordon. Similarly, the theologian Richard P. McBrien, journalist and writer Maureen Dezell, and sociologist Andrew Greely combine to illustrate the impact that the Irish Church has had on its American equivalent. Wall maintains that looking towards Ireland from the US, and drawing on American notions of egalitarianism and individual freedom, sometimes allows for a more dispassionate view of Ireland’s Catholic heritage and enables envisaging its future with a far greater clarity than can be achieved when change is all around you.