[In the following review, Billington offers negative assessment of Temporary Shelter.]

The keening of a frightened and suffering woman is never far from the surface of Mary Gordon's writing. These 20 stories—some long, others only a few pages, some about the Irish immigrant poor, others about the Long Island rich, some imbued with the spirit of the countryside, others set in cosmopolitan London or New York—all carry with them the same atmosphere of fatalistic depression, of lives lived with at best lack of hope and at worst something dangerously threatening.

This theme is most acutely expressed in the second story, just four pages long, called “The Imagination of Disaster,” which is written in a first person, present tense, stream of consciousness narrative. A housewife and mother going about her everyday tasks is obsessed by the dangers of the future. Faced by her daughter wanting help with modeling clay animals, she thinks with terror: “I cannot pervert her life so that she will be ready for the disaster. There is no readiness; there is no death in life.”

The vulnerability that the Gordon woman feels about herself is increased and made obvious through her concern for her children. Temporary Shelter, the long title story, takes this process a stage further and makes the child's terrors central. It is one of several stories where the author speaks with a child's voice and deals with the loaded themes of class and religious differences. It is a more densely worked piece than “The Neighborhood,” where another small, unhappy child, also possessing a single unsatisfactory parent, searches for comfort. In “The Neighborhood” the child finds a moment of happiness with a warmhearted but sluttish Irish neighbor. In “Temporary Shelter” the child steps out bravely into the wide world. In neither case does the black curtain of gloom lift very far.

Adult gloom centers, hardly surprisingly, on the relationship between women and men. The divorced or otherwise single woman, usually with children she must cope with on her own, features in almost every story. “The Other Woman” is the simplest but most effective example. A happily married wife—a unique state in the book, expressed mainly through a comfortable physical relationship—discovers her husband weeping uncontrollably after reading a story about a husband who, out of love for his children, didn't leave his wife for his lover. It has reminded him of a similar sacrifice he made in the past. The happily married wife is horrified at his tragic tears, realizing he has never loved her so deeply. The moral comes out clearly: there is no security anywhere; only temporary shelter.

The alternative to the pain inherent in the male-female relationship is shown through one of the best stories, “Out of the Fray.” Here a newly paired （though much-divorced） couple go to London, where they find a discarded wife. Apparently supremely self-sufficient, she is soon revealed to be emotionally crippled by the breakup of her marriage nearly 20 years ago. Moral: loneliness is as threatening as involvement. “Out of the Fray” is written in the personal, almost diarylike manner that seems to come most naturally to Ms. Gordon. It suits her aim for a high emotional content but tends to limit her to a one-tone voice.

Possibly she is aware of this problem, since one of the longest stories, “Now I Am Married,” is divided into a short prologue and five sections headed by the names of the women who speak. The narrator is a second wife visiting her husband's family in England. The other women talk to her. The technique does get around the problem to some extent, but it also appears as an admission of structural defeat.

Besides, here, as in the other stories, there is no real indication of an authorial point of view—a dangerous lack in stories aiming to be above glossy-magazine level. Perhaps this is another way of saying there is very little sense of morality, of choices made, for good or for ill, of guilt suffered rightly or wrongly, of the struggle to break the barriers of being merely human. Although Ms. Gordon's characters suffer, they do so in a numb and mindless kind of way. She is writing out of emotion, and it suffuses and blurs the writing.

“The Dancing Party” is the most stylishly written of the collection and comes nearest to breaking what seems to be the Gordon mold. The subject is the habitual one, and no less compelling for that, of the pairing or nonpairing of the sexes and is approached with the usual sense of foolish hopes sharpened by impending doom. However, the characters are dealt with separately, and their different thoughts and reactions during the course of the same event are cleverly counterpoised with each other. In one sense the story does Ms. Gordon a disservice because it points up the tendencies in the rest of her writing. Neither wit, irony, satire nor humor is on her agenda, all sacrificed, presumably on the altar of sensibility.

Ms. Gordon attempts to step beyond her limits with “A Writing Lesson.” Sadly, the result is pretentiously obscure rather than thought-provoking: “If you are writing a fairy tale, you can begin by saying that they had built a house in the center of the woods. And they sat in the center of it, as if they were children, huddled, cringing against bears.” Short stories are a testing ground for any novelist, particularly one whose talents lie rather in conveying the intimacies of a woman's mind than in any stylistic finesse. This sort of writing, in which Mary Gordon is most successful, is in danger of becoming indigestible in a collection of short fiction, needing the breadth of the novel form to give it background and air. Nevertheless, Temporary Shelter contains some stories that are touching, and some that are memorable.