Okay, actually a 2.5.

I loved her dark stories. My favorite was the one about the woman who grew up in a dirty home and tries to hang out with her filthy neighbor after she's moved out.

Mary Gordon's prose is so precise and elegant, Her characters so deftly drawn, her stories are a pleasure to read, even though they tend to end on a depressing note.

So far I love it -
the stories are well written and very short. Sometimes I can read one a day. Each one is different.
I am not done with the book yet, but so far I like it a lot.

This is an interesting collection of short stories that are intriguing and explore many charters.

I like Mary Gordon, I guess I don't know if I like her, I like her writing.

Almost finished this mammoth volume but not quite; ran out of renews at the library; but I greedily read as many stories as I could. My favorites: "Intertextuality," "Death in Naples," "The Epiphany Branch" from the new stories; "Temporary Shelter" from her earlier work. Such nuance, such care for texture (her attention to the wallpaper, for instance, reminds me of Vulliard's love for patterns -- one of Mike's favorite painters lately); such a quickly & fully created material world in her stories.
Gordon is no doubt a master, so my low-ish star rating has more to do with the reading experience of reading these stories back to back. She conveys a suspicion of all motives, especially those of do-gooders or people in helping professions -- much like Alice Munro, and with a similar worldly-wise feeling, but without the same love, or warmth; the underbelly of good works is such a vital theme, but it felt a little heavy-handed after awhile; also as in Munro's stories, there's the taboo of being a not-good girl -- a theme I love. Gordon's stories deal a lot with emotion, and writes it well, so the lack of warmth for me may be the NYC terrain (versus small town Ontario in Munro).
I might prefer Gordon in longer form; gives me time to care more and care as much as she demands that I care.

A section that struck me hard & bright:

"I don't know why I wasn't frightened of Mrs. Lynch; I was the sort of child to whom the slightest sign of irregularity might seem a menace. Now I can place her, having seen drawings by Hogarth, having learned words like harridan and slattern, which almost rhyme, having recorded, in the necessary course of feminist research, all those hateful descriptions of women gone to seed, or worse than seed, gone to some rank uncontrollable state where things sprouted and hung from them in a damp, lightless anarchy."
(317, from "The Neighborhood")

wow this book was amazing. there were s many stories that were completely different from one another. my favorite story was called Separation. It was really sad. It was about a mother who realizes her kid is growing up and she knows he will be gone before she can blink twice. she doesn't want him to go but she knows he will be gone soon and there will be nothing she can do about it.

this story is like many parents stories. their kids grow up really fast even when they don't want them to. A lot of people have said to me "it was only yesterday that you were running around in dippers". this story is about that. its about a mothers baby fading before her own eyes. she doesn't want him to be gone but he slowly is leaving her.

in the story, the mother and child only found peace with each other. the little boy didn't get along with any of the other children and mother felt like she wasn't supposed to be there when she was around the other mothers at her kids daycare. they only felt happy around each other.

this also shows how hard it is to get people to accept you for who you really are. the main family wasn't as wealthy as the other families at the daycare. this shows how class matters to people and how upper class people prefer to be around other upper class people and how middle class people prefer to be around other middle class people and lastly how lower class people prefer to be around lower class people.

in a way, this story reminded me of Nikkie and Micha. there wasn't a man around in either of their families when there should have been, and they both had big bumps in their roads to becoming a happy well supported family. its kind of hard to explain how their families are alike but its easy to understand when you read the story. this was only one of the amazing stories in the stories of mary gordon.

I am convinced that Mary Gordon and Lydia Davis share some cosmic talents. Within these 400 pages, I had to, at time, remind myself that I wasn't reading a Davis book. Both writers write about oboes (What's with that?). Gordon's book is filled with subtle wit and intriguing situations.

i always end up loving mary gordon's stories about lonely, old women; my favorites are "the epiphany branch" and "death in naples."

Thought provoking stories of life and living. Enjoy Gordon's writing style, her use of the everyday everyman/woman to walk the reader through life's phases. So good and intense!

I loved this book. I liked every single one of the stories, and absolutely loved some of them. This is another example of the kind of short stories I aspire to write.
Gordon repeats some themes over several stories, but the stories never seem repetitive because the characters and situations she presents are so varied. She touches a lot on the theme of people who externalize anything that might qualify as a shadow: our flaws, our fears, our feelings of inadequacy or inappropriateness, the certainty of death.
I also like that she treats people of faith very matter-of-factly. One of my frustrations with late 20th and early 21st century fiction is that it either ignores faith or deals with it inadequately. People of faith are portrayed as naive or hypocritical, or you get the other extreme of Christian fiction, which oversimplifies every human problem as being rooted in rejection of Jesus. In fact, the existence and nature of God is the most important human topic, in my opinion, and ought to be dealt with in fiction more intelligently. In a couple of these stories, Gordon writes about modern nuns and lets their faith inform their choices without removing their agency and making their choices too simplistic. She doesn't really grapple with issues of faith, but she does weave it naturally into some of her stories, and I liked that.