In one of these three superb novellas [in The Rest of Life], an eager Catholic priest tries to tell the non-believing narrator about Christ's Ascension. He plunges in breathlessly, stumbles, gets events hopelessly out of sequence, but “the badness of the storytelling left spaces you could fill in so in the end you saw more, understood more, than you would have from somebody who'd told it well”. Filling in the spaces is what Mary Gordon does so remarkably. The details of her characters' lives come piecemeal, vivid and disorderly as memory; but it is the connecting monologues, where the protagonists muse cautiously on the mysteries of love, guilt, parenthood, death and hope, that give these stories their haunting vigour and integrity.

Gordon's heroines are intelligent realists, wryly aware of their own limitations and, in consequence, constitutionally apprehensive. In “Living at Home,” the narrator is a doctor working with autistic children who live in perpetual fear of their own fragmentation, scarcely able to express even their immediate desires. “Today, when we asked a little boy what he wanted to eat, he answered ‘Pandemonium’.” If language is treacherous, so are the orthodoxies by which adults seek to impose shape and meaning on their lives. The narrator's mother, who since fleeing Nazi Germany has built for herself a fortress of domestic security in England, is slipping into senility, no longer able to manage even the small, protective rituals of ordinary living. The narrator's own attempts at marriage and domesticity, “sitting on the furniture, using the crockery and silverware as if it were eternal”, have failed and she has come to rest, in a spare white London flat, with a lover who is a foreign correspondent. She scarcely understands him—why he is fearless in war zones but terrified in the dentist's chair, why he has to keep leaving her, why the horrors he witnesses leave his faith in people's capacity to improve their lives unshaken. She does understand that it is the differences between them she values. She can't share his optimism, but she can shelter in its warmth.

Mary Gordon writes acutely about the nourishing power of the most imperfect, conditional love. In “Immaculate Man,” the narrator is a divorced mother of teenagers, her lover a priest, celibate until the start of their unlikely affair. Her work in a refuge for battered women brings daily reminders of human beings' capacity to inflict harm; his belief in human goodness seems unquenchable. He thinks he will love her forever; she knows he will eventually prefer some more vibrant woman. For him, death means eternal peace and joy, for her it means eternal years of loneliness, “hurtling towards nothing”. Meanwhile, she thinks, “There you are. And here I am with you. With. The beautiful and rare word.”

In the marvellous title novella, 78-year-old Paola has led a frozen life, nursing an appalling guilty secret for 63 years. When she was a teenager in Turin, her absurdly self-dramatising boyfriend proposed a suicide pact. She backed out; he shot himself anyway. His mother spat at her in the street, her adored father, meaning to protect her, sent her to cousins in America. She never saw him again. Now, one of the sons from her long, loveless American marriage is taking her home to Italy. What she expects is the always dreaded exposure of her shame. What she gets, in one of the tender little partial miracles that Mary Gordon renders so persuasively, is a kind of redemption.

These novellas all have a weight and density that belie their shortness. The tone is relaxed and gentle, the language rich and exact, the characterisations authentically complex. One of the narrators reflects ruefully that no one else's life can teach us much about our own. Mary Gordon's gift is to convince us that the opposite is true.