Customer Reviews

Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity

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The first essay, "Grandmother's house", made me shut the book and just gaze for minutes at a time. In reading about her childhood, she forced me to revisit my own "places" before I could come back to hers. Rereading her prose is so pleasurable; it 's like glancing twice at an attractive stranger on a street. The first and last essays seemed the most personal, the best "placement" for them. Everyone should reflect upon her life's places after savoring this book.

Seeing through places is enchanting. Full of the sharp insight and beautiful description I've come to expect from Mary Gordon. A pleasure to read.

If you've ever longed to return to a place from your past, Mary Gordon gently explores why. With memories that are sometimes sad, she connects how place figures into who we love and how we make decisions later on in life. Her chapters are houses that serve as an eclectic garden tour, and which, in the end, make her whole. This is reason enough to read the book, but I love what she says place does for her as a writer. While on vacation last year, I sat in a carribean resort bar before it opened and began to write. The place was red-walled, with black and white accents, and no one would expect that suddenly, this place would be where the words I'd been struggling to put down poured out. And so, as I writer, I shared Gordon's thoughts about falling in love with a place that was not hers to own, but one she would remain connected to forever because it was a place "in which you have written happily and well."

I was very disappointed with this book. While the idea is intriguing, essays set around the theme of place I found the tone overly self indulgent and whiny, similar to Gordon's previous and also disappointing memoir, the Shadow Man. While the portrait of her mother was intriguing, the rest just didn't have enough insight to carry me through and at times, Gordon feels compelled to be so self revealing (telling the world that she likes to do her reading topless) that it's positively embarassing.

Mary Gordon's "Seeing Through Places" is a collection of essays that takes the reader on a journey from the narrator's early childhood and adolescent homes through her adult concept and realization of "home." In addition to providing lavish descriptions of overall scenic detail, the essays' focus is primarily on the buildings themselves and, in many cases, the rooms within those buildings. Each of the essays discusses a specific place (e.g. a house, a church, a school, an office) that in some way shaped the lives of those living, working, or frequenting it. However, beyond simply using place to define character, what is particularly compelling in Gordon's writing is that those buildings that so affect their inhabitants were able to do so because they were characters in themselves; therefore, not only are our "places" reflections of us, we are reflections of them. This technique of depicting structures of wood, stone, mortar and glass as entities having attitudes, motivations, influence, feelings - as having life - is one to which the reader can relate because it offers so much more depth, texture and emotion.
Of the many structures depicted in these essays, the two that best illustrate the technique of giving depth, life and character to something supposedly inanimate are the house on Cape Cod and the grandmother's house. Grandmother's house was a place where the narrator's mother, aunts, and uncle were raised; where she would visit (and ultimately go to live after the death of her father); and where grandmother ruled until her death from cancer. Lacking many modern conveniences and decorated with statues and pictures common to devout Catholic households, this house that became part of the family in 1920 was one not of "prosperity" but of "rightness" (16), where even ironing is described as almost a religious experience. Like her house - proper, dark, solid, dependable, and sure of itself - the grandmother was a workhorse with "no interest in having a good time" (16). Even during the final stages of cancer, "her dying was accomplished stubbornly and thoroughly" (125). As opposed to the by-products of the "plastic generation," this was a house where nothing was replaced or disposed of unless it was worn out (15). The narrator, often chastised for being a dreamer, never felt comfortable in her grandmother's house, especially in the bedroom with no door (where her grandmother slept and from where she could ostensibly see all), where she and the other grandchildren would go "to frighten ourselves" (24). She feared that room's "undependable floor," whose trapdoor might one day catch her off guard and send her hurtling "down to the dark basement" (25). It is only after the young aunt remodeled the house during Grandmother's absence and the trapdoor was sealed that the grandmother grew old and sick. As if the house was angry and resented being disfigured, orderliness was lost, dirt became grime and settled in, and a spiritless apathy pervaded: "We failed the house and it punished us" (48). The mutually satisfying relationship between the grandmother and her house that had existed when both were whole and strong could not be duplicated, and because neither the narrator nor her mother had motivation to try, the house fell into never ending clutter and disrepair: "...the house needed to keep itself alive, to breathe, and to be happy" (49). As she finished her last year of undergraduate school and stood on the brink of a new chapter in her life, the narrator realized that she had to leave the house she could never think of as home, because "to live with this new sense of lightness and clarity, I would need a dwelling that let in the light" (78).
In contrast to the grandmother's house, the house on Cape Cod, where, as an adult, the narrator spent eight consecutive summers writing, is described as a house of color and light, such that, each time she'd go there it struck her as if she "hadn't thought about light properly" since the previous summer (210). This was a house of thinkers and writers, and unlike the soul of the grandmother's house that dwelled in the basement, the soul of the Cape house soared from the attic. Happily and creatively productive days were spent there, especially early in the mornings "when only it and I were awake" (216). Here she was free to be herself and felt approved of by both the house's former owner (also a writer) and by the house itself: "There is a special attachment to a place in which you have written happily and well" (212). When the house was put on the market by the son of the former owner and the narrator could not afford to buy it, she reflected how it had "seduced" her and mourned its loss in her life as one would a lost love: "My time in the house was a gift, a gift that wasn't meant to last" (223-4). Despite all of her contented days spent there, she vowed never to return to "the only house I have ever really loved" (209).
In "Seeing Through Places," Mary Gordon shows more than just how our spaces reflect our personalities; by giving life to the places she describes and depicting them as characters just as much as the human characters in her essays, she shows how our buildings can shape and influence us: "There's a mystery that can surround or locate itself at the center of a house's life...the house's very structure...has a powerful effect upon the decisions people make by which they live and know themselves" (162-3).