[In the following review, Zeidner offers positive assessment of The Rest of Life.]

Since her first novel, the bestseller Final Payments, Mary Gordon's fiction has explored the tug-of-war between duty and desire. Her heroines are often good Catholic girls who sacrifice so much of their own happiness that their very identities become threatened. Gordon's mission is to shake up their complacency—to save them from cloistered virtue.

Her seventh book, The Rest of Life, comprises of three gentle, quiet novellas about Gordon's own brand of unassuming heroine. Two of these women are middle-aged, the third elderly, all at times in their lives when you'd expect them to have settled into cozy bargains with God. But they're still being tested, still having to struggle with the same old thorny issues: sex and death. As the pun in the title indicates, the rest of life isn't all that restful.

The 48-year-old narrator of Immaculate Man, a divorced mother who works in a shelter for battered women, was “brought up to be well-behaved. Brought up to practice all the minor virtues: thrift, honesty, politeness, temperance. All forms of moderation. Above all not to make a fuss.” So she's surprised to find herself embroiled in a love affair with Clement, a 45-year-old priest. Only Father Boniface, the homosexual priest who encouraged Clement to join the church and fought for years against his own sexual impulses towards his young charge, appreciates the depth and complexity of the narrator's hunger for her lover. The narrator's biggest fear is that Clement will leave her, that like Boniface she will have to confront death alone.

The narrator of Living at Home also fears death—her husband's. Lauro is a photo-journalist who travels gleefully to revolutions in remote countries. He's the narrator's third husband; she sets out to explain “why, although I'm far from irresponsible, I've left so many men, and why with Lauro I have been so happy.”

Like Immaculate Man, Living at Home is a graceful meditation on the pains and pleasures of middle age. The narrator, a psychiatrist, works with autistic children; Gordon deftly uses autism as a metaphor for all of our isolation and detachment. “I've always felt,” the narrator says, “that we all live so much of our lives as if we were in a sealed jar, the lid tight, looking out. Things tap on the outside—branches, fingers—but not hard enough. If they tapped too hard, there would be breakage and that mustn't be.”

The 78-year-old widow in The Rest of Life, the last novella, hides as tightly wrapped in her sorrow as those autistic children. Sixty-three years ago, she fled Turin in shame when she failed to keep her part in a suicide pact with her young lover and was held responsible for his death. She endured a loveless marriage, raising her children numbly. Now she travels back to Italy for the first time since her banishment, accompanied by her grown son and his girlfriend, and is forced to question the very nature of the way she has “lived, day by day, watching, waiting, she has never known for what.”

Only the title novella offers a plot, a set of events promising resolution. All of the tales are related in the present tense; pointedly, Gordon enters and exits in the middle of these lives, eschewing inflated climaxes and presenting instead a restrained contemplation about the fragility of daily happiness.

As a writer committed to Catholic themes, Gordon is unusual in that her characters search so hard for happiness—and often find it. Most Catholic novelists would agree with the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that there's “no real pleasure in life.” In some sense, the grimmer Catholic view of this world makes for a better story: It's bloodier and more dramatic. The ordinary people who populate Andre Dubus's fiction confront many of the same theological issues found here, but because they're often less sweet from the onset—they sin harder and more often—their stories have a more satisfying shape.

Unlike the novel, however, the novella form wears the lack of drama well. Gordon's prose isn't showy, but it's rich in image and connection. She excels in describing emotions in concrete physical terms—rooms, houses, landscapes, countries. Except for an occasional glut of rhetorical questions （“What does that mean, that she is living and he is not? What is the difference between life and death?”）, The Rest of Life allow us to sink into the characters' thoughts as if sitting in a trellised garden in late afternoon, with nothing to do but enjoy the crisp solitude.