MASS FOR THE DEAD

Playwright (The Miracle Worker: Two For the Seesaw) William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead is primarily an offertory to his parents, a mother whom no one could touch for "brightness of heart or kitchen," a father always "alive and imperfect," remembered here not only to defy the finality of death but also to retain the continuity of their lives through his-through his children's. It is also an audit of his own growing up and growing away: from the small change of a childhood in the Bronx (marbles, soda pop, and a ten cent allowance) it proceeds to the currency of more universal values. Unabashedly emotional in spots, sometimes rather formless in technique, there are still remarkable scenes: of a grandmother (his mother's mother) who played the horses but never was seen without her of her little black arrings, who survived to bury a husband and fourteen sons: of his father and his long terminal illness when he became "so close to inhuman earth again": and particularly of his mother who scrubbed and cleaned her way through other people's houses as well as her own, fighting for the consanguinity of blood and love, and retaining an indomitable spirit until the end of her "72 years of workaday bones." There will be those who will not respond to the poetic and lyrical insets which follow the schemata of the Catholic mass, but the book, as a testament, as a testimonial, is unarguably affirmative and alive. Literary Guild selection and expected wide appeal.