The text of George Saunders' juror’s essay from the O. Henry collection, 2000, in praise of Mary Gordon’s story “The Deacon.”
"The Deacon"; by Mary Gordon.
Fiction is an urgent business. It is the Dying Us telling stories to the Dying Us, trying to crack the nonsense in our heads open with a big hammer pronto, before Death arrives. What I love about this story is the way it briskly steps up to the Big Questions: Who was this Christ guy anyway? Did He really mean what He said? How are we supposed to love our neighbors when our neighbors tend to be such Gerards — not loveable, not really even likeable, and in fact we sometimes even hate them? (Blessed are the poor, but not the extremely poor, especially not the unkempt extremely poor, and boy oh boy, delivers us from the unkempt extremely poor who are sort of angry and inarticulate about it.)
This story works in a complex and beautiful way: our allegiance is with Joan throughout — we sense that, if we were nuns, we would be this kind of nun, if we were lucky. The Catholics among us have certainly known worse. (I remember one who routinely whacked us with a thick wooden dustbroom; one who slapped my first-grade sister in the face for spilling her milk; one who asked for our ideas about Heaven and then ruthlessly corrected these, with a special venom reserved for anyone who doubted there were actual harps). So we empathize with Joan, admire her even. And we can’t help but viscerally share her disgust for Gerard. Gerard is beautifully done, delightfully hateable, passive, unaware, platitudinous, and his Mister Potato Head ears are the perfect ears for him, metaphorically: not so great for actually hearing anything.
Then, in that magnificent scene at Gallagher’s, the world is turned inside out. Retrospectively, in an instant, we see Joan’s faults, which are glaring. She is a control freak, she likes almost no one, her Christianity is self-serving and strangely corporate. Every time I read this scene, I have a strong physical reaction, which includes tearage/chest flutters/hot face/euphoria/ and an urge to deeply resolve to be kinder and more attentive forevermore. These reactions start at the line: “Gerard began to cry,” and build throughout the rest of the story, as I see that Gerard, his bad ears and ploddingness and incompetence notwithstanding, has a deeper understanding of the true nature of compassion than Joan does (and than I did, until just that moment in the story) — compassion is not emotional, but dispassionate; not inspired, but solid; at its heart is attention. It has nothing to do with liking someone, and everything to do with easing suffering, with understanding one’s self as essentially not separate from the sufferer. “The Deacon” itself, by that definition, is a profound act of compassion, by one of our very finest short story writers.
