Book #1: Break Up the Family: William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead

"You say, break up the family,
and let's begin to live our lives."
 
                  --Morrissey

I have started A Mass for the Dead, by William Gibson. No, it is not the cyberpunk Gibson, but the now largely dustbinned playwright from the 50s and 60s.

The book, published first in 1968, is a memoir of his family, a doomed and interesting group of poor Irish Americans. Set in pre-War Harlem and the Bronx, it recreates a people so different from us they could have lived in another millennium much less a century. Here the bonds of family were all and destiny was decided in your teens when you married. People were more conservative and trapped but also more reckless. They were full of fear, but also joy.

The paperback edition I have (see above) has three pages of effusive praise from the critics after the title page. Lewis Mumford proclaims it, "One of the few books of our time that will still deserve reading a century hence." Well, Gibson's memoir is nearing the mid-century mark and it is out-of-print and largely unread. You can't buy a new copy at Amazon. At library thing only sixty members list it in their collections, and only one has reviewed it. To be fair, Mumford did say "deserve" to be read, not "will" be read a in 2040.

And as I hit the 100 page mark, I find myself in total agreement. The book is a memoir in the best sense, not a story of the author but of the dead family members who haunt him.

Gibson's prose is masterful. Feelings are never described. We get anecdotes and stories strung together in the dream-like quality of memory. Not a sentence rings false. There is nothing canned or embellished for dramatic effect. One of my favorites: his father methodically squeezing to pulp a bunch of bananas after an argument with his stubborn mother, then calming down and setting out into the evening streets in search of an open fruit stand to replenish the family's supply. We don't get the subject of the fight; Gibson was six and did not recall it and would not invent one. Gibson does not comment on the scene, apologize or condemn. He describes it and moves on.