Florence Gordon [electronic resource] :

Title:

Author:

Description:

-- Booklist “Exquisitely crafted…Witty, nuanced and ultimately moving.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s -- Paste “Deliciously sharp and deeply sympathetic…a truly gifted novelist.”—Adam Kirsch, -- Booklist “Exquisitely crafted…Witty, nuanced and ultimately moving.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s -- Paste “Deliciously sharp and deeply sympathetic…a truly gifted novelist.”—Adam Kirsch, Tablet

Publisher:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

Date:

2014

Digital Format:

CLOUDLIBRARY EPUB

Language:

English

Summary

A "hilarious and addictive" novel about a grandmother who just wants to be left alone, from the author of Starting Out in the Evening ( San Francisco Chronicle ).

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle , Salon, and The Millions, and a Best Fiction Book of the Year by the Christian Science Monitor ·
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize ·

Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous, passionate, feminist icon to young women, invisible to almost everyone else. At seventy-five, Florence has earned her right to set down the burdens of family and work and shape her legacy at long last. But just as she begins to write her long-deferred memoir, her son Daniel returns to New York from Seattle with his wife and daughter, and they embroil Florence in their dramas, clouding the clarity of her days and threatening her well-defended solitude. And then there's her left foot, which is starting to drag...

With humor and a tender respect for humanity in all its flaws, Brian Morton introduces a constellation of unforgettable characters--chief among them Florence, who can humble the fools surrounding her with one barbed line, but eventually finds there are realities even she cannot outwit.

"Morton's intelligent, layered portrait of a feisty, independent older woman is an absolute joy to read, not only for its delightful wit but also for its dignified appraisal of aging and living life on one's own terms."-- Booklist (starred review)

"Exquisitely crafted...Witty, nuanced and ultimately moving."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"Smart, funny, and compassionate...a treat."-- People

"It's such a cliché to say a book makes you laugh and cry, but this one does, in the deftest way." --Emily Gould, Paste

"Deliciously sharp and deeply sympathetic...a truly gifted novelist."--Adam Kirsch, Tablet

"Morton's intelligent, layered portrait of a feisty, independent older woman is an absolute joy to read, not only for its delightful wit but also for its dignified appraisal of aging and living life on one's own terms."-- Booklist (starred review)

"Exquisitely crafted...Witty, nuanced and ultimately moving."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

"Smart, funny, and compassionate...a treat."-- People

"It's such a cliché to say a book makes you laugh and cry, but this one does, in the deftest way." --Emily Gould, Paste

"Deliciously sharp and deeply sympathetic...a truly gifted novelist."--Adam Kirsch, Tablet

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) offers up a fascinating family presided over by the irascible Florence Gordon, a 75-year-old New York City intellectual and feminist activist who likes to surprise, argue, and criticize. Florence never sought public adoration during her long career committed to women's empowerment, but, now that she has been touted as "an American classic" by her young new editor, she finds she likes the attention. Her pending memoir will be her crowning literary achievement, but her family's temporary relocation to New York from Seattle interferes with her process: she considers it an unwelcome intrusion into her well-established routine. Florence's son, Daniel, is a Seattle policeman, an apparently disappointing career choice for the son of a famous feminist, and she cannot understand why she feels so little affection for him. She thinks his wife, Janine, is a vacuous suck-up and also has a difficult time connecting with her inquisitive teenage granddaughter, Emily, although the two eventually develop a tentative rapport. Florence never sees the disaster looming in her son's marriage after an unexpected, life-altering medical diagnosis causes her to make two fateful decisions about her own future. As a strong-willed, independent woman, Florence is comfortable with herself and the manner in which she deals with others-"one of the fine things in life is the difference between what goes on inside you and what you show to the world." Morton's characters are sharply drawn, vivid in temperament and behavior, and his prose smartly reveals Florence's strength and dignity. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

Unexpected celebrity and long-absent family members distract a heroically cantankerous 1960s-era activist in the summer of 2009 as she reluctantly confronts the challenges of age.Morton (Breakable You, 2006, etc.) returns to the world of writers with Florence Gordon, a feisty literary lioness of the U.S. feminist movement. At 75, she has a just-published book thats languishing, and despite years away from the limelight, she's embarked on a memoir only to learn that her longtime editor is retiring. No matter: She treasures her solitude and having fun trying to make the sentences come right. Yet fame befalls her in the form of a top critics review of her book in the New York Times. Family matters also intrude. Her ex-husband, a vicious burned-out writer, demands that she use her contacts to get him a job. Her son and his wife are back in New York after years in Seattle. Their daughter, Emily, helps Florence with research and almost warms up the gloriously difficult woman. Then the matriarchs health begins to nag her with strange symptoms. While Florence dominates the book, each person is the center of a world, as Emily thinks, and Morton brings each member of the small Gordon clan to life at a time when there is suddenly much to discover about their world. Hes also strewn the novel with references to books and writers and the craft itself, which is appropriate for the somewhat rarefied settingManhattans historically liberal, bookish Upper West Side, where Mortons characters often dwelland a treat for anyone keen on literary fiction.Always a pleasure to read for his well-drawn characters, quiet insight and dialogue that crackles with wit, Morton here raises his own bar in all three areas. He also joins a sadly small club of male writers who have created memorable heroines. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Seventy-five-year-old feminist and activist Florence Gordon, blunt, imperious, intolerant of distractions, has been fighting the good fight in obscurity for decades until now. A front-page review in the book section of the New York Times has called her a national treasure. Suddenly, she is being feted at conferences and profiled in magazines, and her new publisher loves the first draft of her memoir. But there are a few things intruding on her work: she has a nagging fear about her health, and her family has come to New York City for the summer. She can barely tolerate her fawning daughter-in-law, her granddaughter is a cipher, and her son has defied his intellectual upbringing by becoming a cop. But the summer brings a few surprises; she forges a rapport with her granddaughter when she hires her as a researcher and finds that her new fame brings her a great deal of contentment, although she is still capable of launching a few well-placed barbs when her patience is tested. Morton's intelligent, layered portrait of a feisty, independent older woman is an absolute joy to read, not only for its delightful wit but also for its dignified appraisal of aging and living life on one's own terms.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

"FLORENCE GORDON WAS trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: She was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual? Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist." As these sardonic opening lines suggest, Brian Morton has set an imposing challenge for his fifth novel: to tell the story of an aging, feminist Manhattan intellectual trying to write her life story while all too mindful of how little purchase aging, feminist Manhattan intellectuals and their life stories would seem to have on contemporary American life. Indeed, his congenitally difficult protagonist - so caustic and cold she even walks out of her own surprise birthday party - pursues her latest work despite the confidently bleak expectation that no more than a palsied handful of friends, colleagues and devoted readers will care. But Florence Gordon's selfassured life of the mind is intruded upon by a series of unexpected people and events, a result of the signal attention she enjoys for her latest essay collection - from Martha Nussbaum, writing on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Nussbaum calls her "a national treasure," boosting Florence and her work to sudden, almost Thomas Piketty-like prominence. She becomes famous, however, just as a grave illness inexorably descends, and all the while she's encircled by the fumbling members of her family, tangled in their own intersecting personal dramas - of youthful ambitions (her college-age granddaughter), midlife marital crises (her son and daughter-in-law) and despairing old age (her ex-husband, a very obscure academic, and now a very envious one). This arrangement of people and problems affords Morton opportunities for satire that are likely to have found inspiration in his own experiences as a well-established intellectual, professor and novelist. Florence's courtly editor of many years steps down, to be replaced by a hipster. On her book tour, she's hostage to a brutally helpful, horrifically sunny volunteer who is, of course, writing her own memoir. Florence's admiring granddaughter and impromptu research assistant, Emily, has never heard of Ed Koch or the revolutions of 1989 (among much, much else), but as she spends time with Florence and her friends she congratulates herself on "feeling very meta" about it all. Funny stuff, but these days, making jokes about the poised ignorance of college students is as easy as shooting Stanley Fish in a barrel. Morton traffics too much in this kind of familiar cleverness, as well as in obligatory left-liberal disappointment riffs about Barack Obama, coupled with sitcom-smart family dialogue and writing-kit-quality takes on life in New York: "The city was overwhelming, in all the best ways"; "Even walking was different in New York" ; New Yorkers look "both battle-hardened and hopeful in that distinctly New York City way." Flabby and flat, such material attests to the novel's substance, or lack thereof. For all its focus on one woman's intensely pursued life of the mind, and its heavy stock of references to the academy, to the publishing world and to high-echelon New York culture, this novel about the surprising power of ideas is surprisingly devoid of any, certainly when compared with similarly concerned books by the likes of Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing and A.S. Byatt. Morton never provides any significant material directly imagined from Florence's apparently important body of feminist cultural criticism, or from her memoir-in-progress. Doing so would have provided a needed charge to the book's interpersonal dramas, which often feel canned. Including Florence's own writings would also have enhanced the contours of her interior life as she struggles with the prospect of debilitation and death. And this would have enabled Morton to explore the lasting currency of some 1960s and '70s ideas about culture, power and gender by testing them against an array of 21st-century experiences, brought into shared orbit around a protagonist who's more superficially complicated than meaningfully complex. In other words, "Florence Gordon" is a clever and amusing novel about intellectual life that leaves you feeling no more than "very meta" about intellectual life. RANDY BOYAGODA'S latest novel is "Beggar's Feast."

Library Journal Review

New York City serves as a beloved character in Morton's study of a woman who can best be described as a force of nature. A noted feminist writer with an acerbic wit, Florence Gordon tolerates the company of only her oldest and closest friends. She has a former husband who's a less successful writer and a son whose family inhales the cultural richness of the city as they move to New York from Seattle, imposing on Florence. At the same time as her life's work is suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, 75-year-old Florence's health begins to decline. Still, she remains the matriarch of a family that avoids authentic interaction through snappy repartee that needs to be decoded if any real meaning is to be found. It all builds up to one weekend when everyone deceives everyone else on some level; each character must then begin the process of dealing with the consequences of his or her own choices. VERDICT This novel shows us how a woman uses her strengths and her lifelong friendships to face challenges strictly on her own terms. Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) has created an obstreperous, rebellious character who is likable for being true to herself. [See Prepub Alert, 3/31/14.] Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

1 Florence Gordon was trying to write a memoir, but she had two strikes against her: she was old and she was an intellectual. And who on earth, she sometimes wondered, would want to read a book about an old intellectual? Maybe it was three strikes, because not only was she an intellectual, she was a feminist. Which meant that if she ever managed to finish this book, reviewers would inevitably dismiss it as "strident" and "shrill." If you're an old feminist, anything you say, by definition, is strident and shrill. She closed her laptop. Not much point, she thought. But then she opened it up again. 2 She didn't feel strident or shrill. She didn't even feel old. And anyway, old age isn't what it used to be -- or at least that's what she kept telling herself. This was her reasoning. Florence was seventy-five years old. In an earlier era, that would have made her an old lady. But not today. She'd been a young woman during the 1960s, and if you were young in the sixties -- "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" -- there's a sense in which you can never grow old. You were there when the Beatles came to America; you were there when sex was discovered; you were there when the idea of liberation was born; and even if you end up a cranky old lady who's proud of her activist past but who now just wants to be left alone to read, write, and think -- even if you end up like that, there's something in your soul that stays green. She wasn't -- this seems important to say -- a woman who tried to look younger than she was. She didn't dye her hair; she had no interest in Botox; she didn't whiten her teeth. Her craggy old-fashioned teeth, rude and honest and unretouched, were good enough for her. She wasn't a woman who wanted to recapture her youth. In part this was because she found the life she was living now so interesting. 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. 3 She was writing a memoir that began with the early days of the women's movement -- the modern women's movement; her own women's movement, the one that had been born in the 1970s. If she could finish it, it would be her seventh book. Each book had posed its own difficulties. The difficulty with this one was that she was finding it impossible to bring the past to life. Her memory was efficient; she could recall the dates and the acts and the actors. But she was finding it hard to remember the texture of the past. Tonight she had finally begun, she thought, to crack the code. She'd remembered a moment that she hadn't thought about in years. It was just a moment, not important in itself. But precisely because she hadn't thought about it in so long, she was able to remember it now with a sense of freshness, and she was hoping she might have finally found the door that would lead her back into the past. She was glad that she was free for the rest of the night. It was seven o'clock on a Friday in early May; she was through with her academic obligations and her mind was clear. And this evening, in which she'd finally, finally, finally, begun to make some progress -- this evening was the happiest one she'd had in a long time. Except that Vanessa kept calling. Her friend Vanessa kept calling, and Florence kept not picking up. After the fifth call, she thought that Vanessa might be in some sort of trouble, and on the sixth, she finally answered. "Thank God you're home," Vanessa said. "I've got a problem." "What's wrong?" "Nothing big. Nothing terrible. It's just that I got pickpocketed, evidently, and I don't have anything except my phone. I need some money to get back home." "Where are you?" "That's why I called you. I'm three blocks away." She named a restaurant. "Well I'm right here," Florence said. "Just come up." "That's nice of you. But it's a little bit complicated." "Why?" "The people I was having dinner with had to run, and I stayed to pay the check, and that's when I found out my purse was gone. So the owner doesn't want me to leave. He wants to be sure I'm not going to skip out on him." "Vanessa, you're a very respectable-looking woman. You're a very old woman. You're obviously not skipping out on him. Tell him you're not Bonnie Parker." "That's just what I told him. That's exactly what I told him, in fact. I told him I'm not Bonnie Parker. But he's not being very understanding. I think he thinks I am Bonnie Parker. I'm really sorry. But it'll just take a minute." People, Florence thought as she put on her shoes. What do I need them for again? He's afraid she'll skip out on him. As Florence waited for the elevator, she was muttering to herself. She reminded herself of Popeye the Sailor Man. She crossed the street, still muttering. Muttering, and clenching and unclenching her fists. She was doing this with her fists because she'd been having some trouble with her left hand. Carpal tunnel syndrome. Her fingers sometimes jumped around as if they had five little minds of their own. A neurologist had told her to get an ergonomic keyboard and an ergonomic mouse and an ergonomic splint for her wrist; she'd gotten all of it, and she'd faithfully done the exercises he prescribed, but none of it was working so far. Muttering, clenching, unclenching: I must look, she thought, like a madwoman. Excerpted from Florence Gordon by Brian Morton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.