Gordon

Some time ago, I read Edith Templeton's book " The Darts of Cupid". Upon reviewing the book online a fellow reader recommended I check out her best work "Gordon". Ms. Templeton was definitely unconventional and her stories I read were so original that I had to pick up on this recommendation and check out what her novel will be like. I was not disappointed, and this must have been one of the best purchases I ever made. Book is about complicated relationship between a young woman and her lover who happens to be psychiatrist. They meet by chance, in a London bar, shortly after WWII is over. Young womand has left her husband and trying to find her way in a new post war world and her lover, Gordon, is using his professional skills to dominate her in every possible way. Both of them feed on each other emotionally, sexually and develop strange dependency on each other. Their game drains and strengthens them both, and it is once in a lifetime experience for both. Book was banned in 1960s in Europe and yet it has found following in the underground distribution. It is well written, sort of homage to both Goethe and psychoanalysis and deeply personal. I cannot rememebr if I ever read any other work like this one and that is what excites me about this work.

Easily one of my favorite reads. By the 3rd time through I was able to grasp the core of what the character was about.

It's not the duel with psychiatry that makes this book great. It was banned for explicit sex in England (apparently, it was that unusual) in the 1960s. But it's Templeton's amazing writing technique that's truly eye-opening. The opening scene is the fastest, most furious, and funniest that has ever hooked me into a book.

After I read that Kathryn Harrison said Gordon was her favorite love story, I was beyond intrigued. Reading about the abusive relationship between the narrator and Gordon is a little bit like being unable to pull yourself from watching a gruesome car wreck, but I would highly, highly recommend the novel to anyone who has a stomach for it. I've read this book a few times and have gotten multiple friends to read it, and none of them could put it down, either. Edith Templeton's dark and sexy book is a must-read!

I had a hard time deciding whether or not I liked this book. The style is excellent and the point, as I interpret it, is unexceptional, but the events depicted are painful to read, like fingernails on a chalkboard. This is not so much a story about a love affair with a psychiatrist as it is about psychoanalysis with a lover. That it was banned in the UK 50 years ago because of a handful of brief, not very explicit, sex scenes, shows how far the Western world has changed. What still grates, though, is that Richard Gordon, the psychiatrist, abuses the narrator and she finds fulfillment in it. The book narrates the course of their relationship, predominantly by recounting the analysis to which Gordon subjects the narrator. Interestingly, as the book progresses, the narrator loses more and more of her individuality, becoming more dependant on Gordon. The point of the novel is a sharp attack on the culture of therapy. Gordon's physical and mental abuse of the narrator causes damage to her even though she never admits it. It is the analysis itself, though, stripping away the self sufficiency that she had built by relying on the safe psychic crutches of tradition, duty and dignity, which causes the most permanent scars. By the end of the book, long after Gordon has left her life, his effect on her causes her to sacrifice a happy marriage (depicted in that last page which the previous reviewer was so disturbed by). Psychiatry has made the narrator the slave of the psychiatric profession and although she claims to be liberated, her life is symbolized in the decor of the Belgrave Park Hotel, in which she stays in a return to London in the final scenes of the novel. Where once the hotel was slightly old fashioned, full of odd nooks and crannies, lush fabrics and rich furniture, it had become sterile and ugly, functional but characterless. A world which shifts from the Plaza Hotel to a Motel 8 is not really progress, the author seems to say, and it is hard to disagree.