[In the following review, Lurie offers praise for The Rest of Life.]

We read fiction, in part, to widen our social circle: to make new friends effortlessly, receive their confidences and enter their worlds. Mary Gordon's remarkable new book, The Rest of Life, fulfills this purpose wonderfully. Her heroines are all wholly alive and complex contemporary women, and they conceal nothing from us, not even their most intimate secrets.

Though they are full of dramatic incident, the three novellas that make up The Rest of Life do not have plots in the traditional sense. Instead, Ms. Gordon works like a sculptor who shapes and reshapes a figure by pressing bits of clay onto a wire armature. We learn about her characters as we would a new friend: first we hear the basic facts, then gradually more and more is revealed, not necessarily in chronological order

The nameless narrator of the first and perhaps most striking story, Immaculate Man, runs a shelter for battered women and is having a passionate affair with a Roman Catholic priest, an affair that she describes in vivid sensual and emotional detail. She is middle-aged, plain and outspoken, willing to question everything, even her own identity: “How do any of us recognize ourselves? By being around familiar objects, by performing actions that have some similarity to the actions of the past. I think that's all.”

Clement, the priest she loves, appears to her as beautiful, strong and perfect. When they meet he is a 43-year-old virgin who has never been close to another woman, and he declares that he will always love her, but she does not feel secure: “I'm a woman, how can I talk about possessing a man's body. How can you possess what you can't enter? What you don't invade, penetrate.”

She is consumed with the fear that Clement will leave her for someone who is not only younger and prettier but who needs him even more than she does—most likely one of the injured women in her shelter. She holds the belief, more common 150 years ago than it is today, that the weaker and more helpless a woman is, the more attractive she is to men: “I feel quite angry at some of the women I'm supposed to help. … I feel they've gotten away with something. Or is it that I feel they've taken something from me? The honored female place. The true, ancient name of woman? That in their supine posture, they arouse in men … the instinct to reach down and lift them up.”

If she loses Clement, she believes, her whole identity will change, she will become one of those women who will not “ever again be prized,” whose body “is of no concern to anyone except yourself. You worry that one day you might get sick, that you‘ll become a nuisance or a burden. But that's all. You know that's all your body will be to anybody else: a nuisance or a burden. No one will look at you again attentively or lovingly.”

The heroine of Living at Home, Ms. Gordon's second novella, is also nameless; but initially she seems far more in control of her life. She is attractive, articulate, well educated and successful. As the psychiatrist in charge of a clinic for autistic children, she is famous for her understanding of her young patients, who are hauntingly described: “Aloneness is what life is about for them. … They create edifices or machines to separate themselves from the world. One child would speak only inside a construction of cardboard, wires, tins. … They can't predict, so they are safe only in sameness. They are so far from an experience of time that only space and its emptiness remains.”

Yet she too is emotionally dependent on a man: an Italian journalist named Lauro who covers wars and revolutions for a London newspaper. She too is obsessed with losing her lover, in this case not to another woman but to illness or accidental death. When Lauro is about to have a tooth pulled she does not sleep the previous night, and blames herself for thinking that if he died in the dentist's chair she would not commit suicide.

She is also acutely jealous. She resents the fact that Lauro's visits cheer her invalid mother: “I wanted to take him away from her. I wanted to bring him home to the place where we live, where she doesn't live. … I was afraid she'd drain the life out of him. And I needed his life.”

These fears and jealousies seem to be related to her view of women as naturally alone and lost, like the autistic children. “I've often imagined myself homeless,” she says. “All women do, or many. They see themselves wandering, holding everything they own in a bag, sleeping against the warm sides of buildings in the freezing night.” Essentially, this strong and gifted woman can help only those she sees as weaker than she. Infinitely patient and kind at work, she is impatient and unkind to Lauro when he's ill.

Paola, the heroine of Ms. Gordon's third novella, The Rest of Life, is also someone whose existence centers on—and indeed has been ruined by—men. As a girl in Italy in the 1920s, she is taught to devalue herself, to conceal her knowledge and defer to male opinions. At the age of 15 she is persuaded to enter into a suicide pact by her first lover, a brilliant and disturbed 16-year-old boy called Leo; but at the last minute she refuses to die with him. When this becomes known she is disgraced; Leo's family calls her a whore and a murderer, and her beloved father sends her to America and never sees her again. Though Paola marries and has children, she passes the next 63 years in a state of emotional numbness. Only when she returns to Turin at the age of 78 is Paola able to forgive others and herself. But even then her deepest sympathy is for men who, like Leo, have died young.

Women today are said to have “come a long way.” Yet the heroines of the three novellas that compose The Rest of Life don't seem to have heard the news. Though they all have children they care for and full-time careers—perhaps typically, in what are called the “helping professions”—each of these women is focused on some man with whom she is involved in an obsessive, unequal sexual relationship.

What are we to make of this? Considering Mary Gordon's intelligence and her great gifts as a writer, I think we must read this book not as a post-feminist assertion of our essential emotional weakness but as a cautionary tale: a skilled and complex portrait of three strong, interesting and admirable women who have been deeply damaged by their dependence on men.