SOURCE: Bennett, Alma. “‘Neither Night nor Morning’: The Rest of Life: Three Novellas.” In Mary Gordon, pp. 148-64. New York: Twayne, 1996.

[In the following essay, Bennett argues that the three novellas included in The Rest of Life “form a deliberately crafted whole,” and explore some dominant motifs that resonate throughout the volume.]

From the start of her career, Gordon's works have attracted a wide range of readers, and if getting reviewed in People magazine is any sort of reliable indicator, that range has widened since August of 1993.¹ Still, for Gordon aficionados and her newer readers alike, the 1993 publication of Gordon's The Rest of Life: Three Novellas² marks the debut of a new genre interest that the author plans to continue from time to time. When asked about the genre shift, Gordon has explained, “I think that The Other Side [1989] was an enormous structural labor; it really kind of wore me out for a larger structure. So, I wanted something that was more compressed, more lyric in its impulse, and actually more poetic and not so dependent on author or structure.” Then, responding to an observation that the novellas also suggest a major shift in her technical approach, she continued, “I'm probably more open to less linear, less thoroughly rational ways of structuring” (Bennett interview, 27). This is borne out in ways in which the non-chronological episodes of each protagonist's narrative move, like water currents, forward, backward, into self-interrupting eddies, around obstacle-constructs within the narrator's mind and life.

Not surprisingly then, each novella's plot is subservient to its episodic flow, which reflects, in turn, a meticulously controlled ambiguity, what Gordon describes as “permeability.” An immediate demonstration of both the control and the ambiguity can be found in the novellas' conclusions. At the end of “Immaculate Man,” the first unnamed female protagonist admits: “He holds me in his arms here on the street, the rue Jacob in Paris. ‘I'll never leave you,’ he says again. I believe him. But I don't know for how long” (76). In “Living at Home,” the final musings of the second female protagonist (also unnamed) augment and move the ambiguity forward: “I worry about Lauro, alone, without me in that place. I am lying beside him now. … It is neither night nor morning. … But very soon he'll be awake. And then, I don't know what will happen” (164). Finally, in the third and title novella, “The Rest of Life,” Paola, the seventy-eight-year-old protagonist, with a lifetime of unresolved ambiguity suddenly behind her, walks back toward her hotel in Turin, Italy: “The doorman says, ‘Your son, his friend, are waiting.’ Yes, thank you, she says. Sì, grazie” (257). The understated affirmation in the novella's final words represents not only Paola's first verbal reclamation of her life; the words also suggest an unexpected, albeit still fragile, resolution to the ambiguity underscored throughout the three novellas.

Gordon's close attention to the three conclusions exemplifies the resonances she creates between the novellas. In other words, the novellas are not disparate; they form a deliberately crafted whole. Therefore, what is left ambiguous and what is resolved in all three novellas (and how Gordon achieves their connectedness) will be this chapter's larger consideration. But before approaching the connective tissues of the novellas, perhaps brief summaries that pull together the episodic fragments within each novella will serve as a helpful grounding.³

“IMMACULATE MAN”

The collection's first novella is a first-person narrative by its unnamed female protagonist, a forty-eight-year-old social worker and divorced mother of two teenagers. Set in the early 1990s in New York State, Manhattan, and Paris, the story focuses on her unexpected relationship with Father Clement [Frank] Buckley, the last active priest of the disbanded Paracletist order, whose Motherhouse has been turned into a battered-women's shelter that he keeps in repair and directs. The protagonist meets the boyishly handsome, forty-five-year-old priest when she is called in as a consultant for his diocese's organization of the shelter. Clement, she observes, is a guileless man, both a poor judge of character and highly intuitive about human suffering.

An Illinois-born daughter of lackadaisical Congregationalists, the narrator initially has no guilt about their hidden relationship and little knowledge of what the Catholic Church represents to priests of her and earlier generations. She is not a believer, but she assumes that worship should entail comprehensible rites that banish the dark mysteries to which Clement is so devoted. Moreover, she equates the love of light with women's sexuality and, conversely, the love of dark entrances into mystery with men's desires to enter women's bodies.

Their relationship began three months after she started commuting from Manhattan to the shelter, where, one day, she becomes ill. It is then, in a former cell decorated with “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” that they first make love. The narrator feels that Clement has brought her back to faith, not in God, but in sexuality. Because he had never made love, never touched a woman, or looked at pornography, she knows his delight with her middle-aged body is rare and that he chose her when he found himself without a priestly order or work. She also understands why they will never marry. As the protagonist has gradually learned from Father Boniface Lally, Clement's Paracletist mentor and best friend, their marriage would strip Clement of everything he has loved since age thirteen. Moreover, Clement's harshness with her son and daughter would rupture her and her children's loving, healthily chaotic relationship. Even without marriage, she cannot imagine life without him. The elderly, seriously ill Boniface, who approves of their relationship, shares her feelings, and to her he confides his never-intimated sexual attraction to Clement. Her narrative ends when she and Clement are in Paris, a romantic trip he insists upon paying for with the first money he has ever earned. He vows again that he will never leave her; she remains unsure.

“LIVING AT HOME”

The middle novella is a first-person narration by an unnamed, British-born female protagonist, who, since the mid-80s, has lived with Lauro, a fifty-seven-year-old, Italian-born foreign correspondent who is compulsively interested in Third World trouble spots and revolutions. The narrator is a respected, forty-five-year-old psychiatrist who directs a London school for autistic children. An only child of Jewish parents who left Germany for London in 1935, the narrator—previously married three times (to a medical student, a doctor, and a half-Russian charmer) and a loving mother of two almost grown sons—has lived with Lauro for five years. A tactful, intuitive, and kind man (except to his mother and family), he frequently leaves on self-chosen, dangerous assignments. Seemingly impervious to a fear of death except when facing routine medical work, Lauro shares the narrator's need for “entrances and exits.” Still, their relationship and London flat are their oases.

As her narration unfolds, she reveals an ability to enter autistic patients' obsessively closed worlds and to help them attempt openness with safety and without shame. Paradoxically, her medical speciality in dealing with children terrorized by change and fragmentation is intimately related to her personal life. Trying to cope with her widowed mother's decline, the psychiatrist is shamed and disoriented by the physical and mental changes in her mother. At the same time, the narrator reveals radical aversions to her mother's lifelong horror of change. Intellectually, the narrator had understood her mother's fixations on a home, fastidiousness, and objects brought from Germany; these were coping mechanisms after having to flee Germany and to leave London for ten years. Nevertheless, the protagonist, despite concern for her sons, leaves each of three marriages when her husband at the time settles into a fixed relationship with a place and objects. Not unexpectedly, then, the London flat that she and Lauro delight in is all-white, austere, with modern furniture and objects that carry no emotional attachments. And when she and Lauro go to Italy for his sister's wedding, the narrator recognizes in Lauro's petulance toward his mother his similar need “to be away from her [his mother] to feel he breathed air as a man.”

The novella ends late at night, as the narrator expects Lauro to wake up momentarily. Like the children with whom she works, both she and Lauro fashion their life together around no future tense, no looking back; the present is all each claims, an open, permeable claim that admits her fear of his death and their mutual appreciation of being “mated, but in the way of our age, partial” (155).

“THE REST OF LIFE”

The final novella is its protagonist's intensely private, third-person account, which she frequently interrupts by even more intense (italicized) passages, many of which are first-person, imaginary addresses to particular people. We recognize this technique as one Gordon tried out a few times with her character Ellen MacNamara in The Other Side. In “The Rest of Life,” however, the self-interruptions are an integral part of the novella's structure, and one of the most pleasing aspects of this stylistic and rhetorical device is in studying Gordon's craft as she fashions each italicized section as an elaboration on a verbal cue from the preceding third-person narration.

The story opens and closes in 1991 in Italy, to which Paola, the seventy-eight-year-old, Turin-born protagonist, has returned after more than six decades. In 1928, after the suicide of her sixteen-year-old lover Leo Calvi, Paola's unnamed father, a widower and professor of entomology, had sent her away to live with relatives in America. Since then, she has mourned for the face of her father, who, despite his love, had failed to protect or defend her. Yet, she has sealed her mind against remembering Leo's face, blown away by his suicide. Since she had promised to join him in suicide, the fifteen-year-old Paola had left Italy with youthful perceptions of wrongdoing, betrayal, and shame, none of which were ameliorated by her father or shared, not even with her late husband, Joe Smaldone, a happy-spirited Sicilian-American whom she met during World War II. Still, she has tried to salvage a life that, at age fifteen, she was unwilling to give up. She recognizes that refusing to commit suicide was linked to her not wanting to leave her father and knowing that the brilliant, impetuous Leo did not, as he pretended, know it all; he was as ignorant about sex, life, and death, and even his idealized troubadours, as she. As in her youthful poem, which mistakenly had Eurydice rather than Orpheus look back, Paola had looked back at life, at her father, and Leo had died alone. But, like Orpheus, it is Paola whose life is torn apart by maenadic women, especially her vicious aunt, whom her father does not contradict in 1928. Conversely, seven decades later, when Carlo, the youngest of Paola's three sons, wants to marry his Nigerian-American supervisor, the granddaughter of an Igbo chief, Paola stands up for them, introducing Katherine to Joe's prejudiced family and defying them to injure the young couple's happiness. Their thanks is the trip back to Milan and Turin, where Paola finds that the accusing names, faces, and buildings have disappeared. Only when she makes a solitary trip to the nearby village of Bardonecchia, with its ancient, half-ruined tower where Leo committed suicide, does she weep for no one's having consoled either of them, especially Leo and all young men who died when others, like herself, lived. Finally, she understands that “the dead, being one and many, knew there was nothing to forgive” (257). Returning to the hotel, where the doorman tells her Carlo and Katherine are waiting, she (and the reader) knows that something essential has been salvaged.

“THREE [NOVELLAS] … IN A FIRST-CLASS COMPARTMENT”

For each novella, Gordon has created a singular female protagonist whose life and experiences address a different set of relational, physical, emotional, and spatial issues. On the most obvious level, the sets are linked in three ways, the first two of which are their intimate venues and the protagonists' mature stage of life (middle age and older). Gordon's comments during a 1993 telephone interview⁴ relate directly to these. Prefacing her remarks with “I'm obsessed with how difficult it is to live an ordinary bourgeois life,” Gordon described The Rest of Life as “meditations on the tricky navigation through daily life, which, in contrast to literature, is usually unmarked by high tragedy.” In a 1994 interview,⁵ she explained about her third novella, “The reason why I deliberately called it ‘The Rest of Life’ is that there is all that rest of life that is not tragic and high but takes even the moment of greatest tragedy and incorporates it in a way that is not perfect or heroic but more incarnational.” In both interviews, she follows such contexts with specificity: for example, “I was interested in how a woman inhabits space, particularly domestic space, the world most women live in that is considered so unchallenging.” While admitting that she “enjoyed writing about female desire,” Gordon mentioned that in these novellas, she “was interested in the woman's body maturing” (Hunnewell interview, 25).

The most conspicuous and third link between the women protagonists is their present or past relationships with men. The ongoing intensity of these relationships in the minds and daily lives of the protagonists is the novellas' primary fuel, which is well described by Janette Turner Hospital in the London Review of Books: “Connection, the narrators intimate, … when it is passionately sexual, intellectual and emotional all at once, is like a supernova. It may burn you up. Afterwards there may be nothing but a black hole of loss and shame. And yet without these conflagrations, there would be nothing in the first place, no life, no meaning at all. And ordinary life—which requires gargantuan and exhausting effort—can only be achieved by the clear-sighted acceptance of this risk.”⁶

As could be expected, Gordon's focus on such risks and conflagrations in her characters' lives has generated some feminist concern. For example, in her front-page review of the novellas in the New York Times Book Review, Alison Lurie is uneasy about each protagonist's involvement “in an obsessive, unequal sexual relationship.” She goes on to query and then suggest: “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.”⁷ While understandable, such a reductive reading seems, in this case, myopic, even superficial. It causes Lurie to miss the mark on these novellas as well as the real risk-taking Gordon (a self-declared “red-alert feminist”) sets out for herself in this venture, one that is just as risky as but yet more expansive than her novelistic and short story forays into Catholicism and motherhood and into women, parents, or couples who love too much or too little.

The risks for Gordon are in putting fictional pressure on the daily life, space, and intimacies of three women whose personhood remains porous, fluid, and ambiguous. The most singular metaphor that Gordon creates for the latter inquiry is her carefully researched information on autism, which she uses in the second novella. As the psychiatrist-protagonist of that novella observes, while thinking about her autistic children patients: “The children I treat have trouble understanding the idea of what makes up a person, a person consistently recognizable, consistently the same. The odd thing, to me, is how wholeheartedly the rest of us pretend to understand” (101).

Gordon's readers are accustomed to her creating fictional pressure within an enclosed group or relationship, but the novellas' exploratory pressure on personhood itself and the degree to which Gordon leaves that exploration unresolved, vulnerable, are something quite new. Moreover, the ease with which she combines the intimate pressures and ambiguities suggests a new stage of maturation; it is as if she broke through some invisible threshold in The Other Side, and now, on the other side of that, she has found new freedoms. Regardless of how and if Gordon continues this provocative combination in future work, The Rest of Life deploys it to posit three protagonists not as throwbacks to women who “don't seem to have heard the news” that their gender has “come a long way,” as Lurie has suggested, but as convincing, mobile reflections of female (and male) contemporaneity, in general, and intimate, contemporary personhood, in particular.

The following exploration of the author's connective strategies for and details of such reflections will begin with overt similarities and then move to more subtle and important points. We can notice, first of all, that all three novellas are approximately the same length (73, 85, and 90 pages, respectively), and all have contemporary settings. The first, “Immaculate Man,” and the third, “The Rest of Life,” take place during the early 1990s; the second novella, “Living at Home,” is set in 1989. Likewise, all three stories unfold in primary locations and a secondary location in another country; these locales are, in order: [1] Manhattan, New York State, and Paris; [2] London and Turin, Italy; and [3] Manhattan, Queens, and Milan and Turin, Italy. Gordon does weave a few mini-details through the novellas. For example, in “Living at Home,” 1935 is the year in which the protagonist's parents flee Germany as well as the year in which the protagonist's father in “The Rest of Life” dies after being beaten by Fascist Blackshirts whom he defied. Likewise, Turin⁸ appears in both “Living at Home” and “The Rest of Life” as, respectively, Lauro's birthplace and Paola's hometown. Another example is the Orpheus and Eurydice myth⁹ that makes brief appearances, for varying purposes, in all three novellas. While these through lines add little to the novellas as a whole, the coincidences create tiny pleasures of recognition. More pleasure, however, comes from the crucial correspondences between the novellas.

Certainly, one of these (and one of the strongest achievements in the novellas) is in Gordon's having created three women protagonists whose personalities, daily lives, and loves are as distinctive as they are similar. At first, their personal and professional lives seem disparate. However, a closer scrutiny reveals a great number of similarities that converge into Gordon's larger agenda for the novellas.

The most fundamental similarity, other than the protagonists' gender, mature age, and their fixation on a present or past love, is the narrators' high consciousness of telling the story of their own most intimate life story, a venerable novelistic device that works extremely well in these novellas. For instance, in her first sentence, the protagonist of “Immaculate Man” announces the story she is about to tell (“What happened to me on the bus wasn't unusual”), then interrupts that story with an anecdote from a Russian novel, and finally, in the fifth paragraph, calls herself back to: “I don't know why I began talking about all that. I want to talk about what happened on the bus. But, after all, it's not so bad to start out with a story about a priest. This is a story about one. And, I suppose you could say, about adultery. I don't know yet how all this will turn out. I know that whatever will happen, everybody tried” (3-4). Likewise, on the third page of the second novella, “Living at Home,” the protagonist stops her descriptions of her lover, Lauro, and her parents and their background to say: “I'm telling you this so you'll understand why, although I'm far from irresponsible, I've left so many men, and why with Lauro I have been so happy” (81). A few pages later, she abruptly interrupts a discussion of her autistic patients to check on her reader: “You may be wondering—since we're so different and we do such different things—how Lauro and I met. It was as you might suppose: through friends, at a dinner party” (89-90), a device she repeats much later in her account: “And so, you must be wondering, since Lauro can be so many people, how could I assume that he would be faithful to one person, me?” (134). Sometimes, however, that same protagonist will make us aware of her awareness of her storytelling and of us as her readers with subtler means: “I haven't really said enough about my mother, considering what a part she plays in all this. By ‘all this’ I guess I mean how I have shaped my life” (105).

Quite different but equally intriguing is the story of the delayed story that forms the core of the third novella, “The Rest of Life.” Paola, its protagonist, has never divulged (not for sixty-three years) the central, informing story of her life. On the seventh page of the novella, Paola partially reconfirms to herself why not: “Words are too pliant, too elastic. It's another reason why she hasn't spoken. How can she trust words to tell her story so that it would be anything like the truth?” (173). Later along in the novella, Paola silently tries it out: “There is something she'd like to say, but she doesn't know how to begin. Or no, there are three ways she would like to begin, she doesn't know which is the right one. ‘Let me tell you what I'm like.’ ‘Let me tell you about myself.’ Or: ‘Let me tell you who I am.’ … She'd like a sentence that would be like music: three lines simultaneously woven. She wants to say three things at the same time, but they all mean something different. Yet she wants to say them all” (212). Not until the penultimate page of “The Rest of Life” can Paola feel free enough to broach sharing what she has kept hidden since she was fifteen (all of which the reader, of course, has already learned): “She is excited and expectant: she doesn't know for what. And yet she knows something has happened. Just a hint, a possibility: a suggestion of a face to whom she will tell her story. All the different stories. All the different ways it could have happened, each of them true. As all the faces were the face of Leo. As all the dead are one” (256).

In this collection, then, the protagonists' revealed stories about their lives come together as “three people … in a first-class compartment” (to borrow the first line of “The Rest of Life”), a sort of triad of confessions that, no matter how individually unique, add up to a whole that is larger than its parts. To describe the stories as confessional is not to suggest that they are so in any religious or self-indulgent sense. Although there is ruthless self-honesty and guilt in the novellas, there is no prurient cataloging, no sense of a public act of contrition or purgation. The motion of the words is toward the reader, that best of all confidants. This means that the narratives are not confessional in a diarist's sense of the word; the reader is engaged, even prompted, in these tellings. The syntactical and narrative resonances between the novellas are, of course, just the start, for within the distinctions that make up each story, there are myriad other similarities. Like Paola's recognition about the oneness of the dead, Gordon uses similarities to suggest the possibility that “all the [living] are one.”

An irony is that the protagonists' lives have been constructed on a model that repudiates such oneness, and in this, Gordon teaches us how an undermining device can enhance the experience of the reader's recognizing its opposite, which in this case would be seeing a character (or oneself) as a part of “the other.” All three of the women are conscious of trying to model their lives in stark contrast to another woman's or a parent's persona: The first protagonist's repudiation of her excessively moderate parents' life models surfaces in multiple ways: in her immoderate love of Clement, in the disorderly lives she chose to work with, in her wanting her own children “to have some sense of beauty and pleasure in their lives,” to be more assertive, “to live fully, not to victimize” (53); at the same time, unlike her parents, she will not be shocked if they choose to be and do something other. In the second novella, the narrator, lying in Lauro's arms, tells him, “Everything I've just done is the part of me that's not my mother. As if I were a negative number whose name is Not My Mother” (93). Similarly, Paola, the protagonist of “The Rest of Life,” had, from an early age, formed her sense of self around “I am not her,” meaning her vicious, judgmental aunt (218).

We recognize this negative identification penchant, this mirroring, as a technique Gordon has given other, earlier female characters, such as Isabel (Final Payments), who identifies herself as “not Margaret”; Camille (The Other Side) who takes perverse comfort in not being Theresa; Theresa who embraces everything her mother, Ellen MacNamara, abhors; and, of course, Ellen, who crafts her adulthood in direct defiance of other Irish women immigrants as well as her heritage, her father, and his second wife. In both earlier novels, as well as in The Rest of Life, the women's negations are inextricably connected to rigidities rejected or embraced. And within those reactions to rigidities, Gordon uses abilities, inabilities, and refusals to change as a common ground to delineate and test the damage and health within her characters' private and public personae.

As mentioned earlier, the three protagonists' lives have been or are being transformed by singular love relationships, within which a complex set of similarities can be studied. First of all, both of the protagonists in their mid-forties (the first two novellas) savor their and their lovers' sexuality. That is as apparent as Gordon's hard-won ability to depict such sexuality convincingly. On first inspection, the much older Paola's attitude toward sexuality seems to be something altogether different. We know that her fledgling, naive, and anxious sexual experiences with Leo, at age fifteen, were left frozen, like the rest of her life, after his suicide and her being exiled to the United States. And it is not as if she has been celibate during all the subsequent years. As she remembers her deceased husband, Joe Smaldone, she makes a kind of catalog of those years: “She allowed Joe to marry her; she never felt that she had married him. She wants to turn to her son now and say, ‘I never hurt your father. I never told him that I loved him. … I opened my legs for him. I denied him nothing. I gave him healthy sons. … I never returned his kindness with ingratitude’” (206). Her emotional and sexual detachments begin to take on a different resonance, however, when we notice that only Paola reveals her sexual fantasies and dreams; that, at age seventy-eight, she thinks more about sexuality than the younger protagonists; and that she is able to be pleased and amazed to think of her son and his fiancée's resilient happiness and “Carlo, sleeping happily in Katherine's arms … encircled by the girl who loves him freely, without fear, and whom he freely, fearlessly embraces, just as if this were an ordinary thing” (242). Because Paola has never known this “ordinary thing,” her silent revelations are her only sexual freedoms, and their intensity matches, like a dark photographic negative, that of the younger protagonists.

A second corresponding feature of these protagonists' love relationships is one that simultaneously calls them into question: the man or men Gordon places at the center of each woman's life represents a fundamentally unknowable, unshareable other world: Father Clement [Frank] Buckley's closed world is the priesthood and what his lover, not knowing what to call it, refers to as “All that. … The Catholic Church. That way of thinking” (16). In the second novella, Lauro's is Third World trouble spots and his addiction to these dangerous journalistic assignments. In the third novella, Paola's father and young Leo Calvi represent, respectively, a closed double world of death (one by wartime politics, the second by suicide) that has sealed her off from the formative loves of her life and that came together to exile Paola permanently from her loving father, home, and country. It is obvious that, for the protagonists as well as the novellas themselves, the sealed-off worlds generate tension, in the same way that “No Trespassing,” “Verboten,” and “Pericoloso” signposts, or a wilting mound of flowers on any new grave do. However, Gordon's larger purpose in creating these “othernesses” seems to be precisely that: we can neither know fully nor be known fully. The partial, the flawed, are the given.

A working knowledge of this abstraction is heard, with regularity, in the voices of the women protagonists, each of whom is more troubled by what she does not know than what she knows. In fact, no one of them pretends to more knowledge than she has. The first protagonist, for instance, recognizes, “It's very possible I'll lose him, we [protagonist and Father Boniface] both will, and the church will, and the world. I know just what the danger is. And almost who, and though who isn't important, it's a type of woman, what she represents. And maybe it would be the best thing for him. To lose everything. To be lost. I just don't know” (36). Then, while recalling her parents' embarrassment when her husband left her for another woman, she admits: “They thought I didn't know what's what. I didn't know the score. Maybe my children don't because I never have. … I've wanted them to enjoy their lives, to do more good than harm. If, in the course of that, they occasionally tell me to go get fucked, … I don't mind. Maybe that means that I don't know the score” (53). The second protagonist would agree with that: “I wonder how we ever learn anything. Sometimes I think it's a trick or a miracle that we know anything at all. The problem: that we're often compelled by our positions to act on this knowledge we only think we have. This is true both for my work and for Lauro's. Damage or acts of heroism, murder or crippling or rescues unbelievable in the light of day, are all results of partial knowledge” (143).

The same partianless is confirmed in Gordon's depictions of the four much-loved men in these novellas. Their personalities and daily behaviors are, in varying degrees and paired combinations, brave-weak, brilliant-ignorant, fearless-superstitious, kind-harsh, articulate-inarticulate, and sensitive-insensitive. Parts of the women's more subtly defined complexities (and flaws) are revealed in their recognitions and acceptances of the men's foibles and strengths. Gordon herself has confirmed this premise in pointing out, “I wanted to create men who women actually love. We love flawed men and not heroes. I was trying to say that one of the marks of mature love is learning that one is flawed and so is the loved one, and we are not going to change” (Grossmann, 10E).

In light of the supposed maturity of the women protagonists, it is interesting to notice that none of them—the first two, divorcees in their mid-forties, and the third, a widow in her late seventies—want to remarry or can envision themselves in another love relationship. As the first protagonist realizes about Clement, “I know that I don't want somebody else. Not after I've had him” (62). “His is to me the one desirable body, known, knowing, yearned-for, troubling, arousing, safe” (63). Likewise, the second protagonist, thinking about the times when she and Lauro “make love for hours,” recalls that it is then “I understand that this is the last body I will know in this way. I couldn't be interested in another body again, having Lauro's as I have, so well, so thoroughly, and having been so well known by him. So that if he should die it would mark the end of a certain part of my bodily life too” (149).

Despite such typical, frequently proclaimed certainties, all three protagonists, at several points in each novella, articulate deep uncertainties about pivotal relationships in their lives; these statements heighten both the emotional tensions within each story and the reader's knowledge of the ambiguities that form the core of the protagonists' sense of personhood. Three such statements are particularly good examples of this uncertainty: In “Immaculate Man,” the protagonist points out that Clement is “a terrible judge of character. He makes mistakes with women at the shelter all the time. … Well, he made a big mistake in choosing me. He ought to have chosen someone simpler, like himself, or more impermeable. Not like me” (14). When the second protagonist meets Lauro's ex-wife, a research geneticist, her reaction is: “I understood why he had chosen her. … I was tempted to suggest that they get back together: both Turinese, small, Christian, the same age. … Not like Lauro and me. I'm younger, taller, English, but a Jew. … In taking up with me, Lauro had taken on my displacement. Or my lack of place. Within someone like him, he could have been placed, recognizable, and so approved of on the street” (102). An example from “The Rest of Life” captures one of Paola's impassioned, italicized, first-person, imaginary addresses; in this case, she is speaking to her deceased husband, Joe: “You could have had someone who was good as you were good, and open, and full of faith in life. I'm sorry for you that you chose me, and that you were loyal to me. I'm sorry you saw something in me that was valuable to you. I was dead already when you met me” (206).

Because of the intensity of the protagonists' relationships with men, it is easy to overlook an entire cluster of additional similarities between the three women. For example, none of the protagonists have or have had close female friends; each is, with the possible exception of the first, a very private person. All have children (Paola also has grandchildren) with whom they have good relationships, although those of the second and third protagonists are somewhat detached. All three women abhor children's being damaged, shamed, or isolated; conversely, they take delight in children's buoyant gestures of well-being. At the same time, not one of them derives her sense of identity from her children. Of course, Paola's self-defining secrets have made that impossible; she recognizes that “she accepted maternity dumbly, as another price she had to pay. Anesthetized for the births, she stayed that way for their childhoods. … Sometimes, they charmed her. She knew they waited for their father to come home to give them life” (210). Thus, her autonomy springs from damage that distanced her from her sons. The other two protagonists, however, take special pleasure in the autonomy that separates themselves and their children, an autonomy they both rightly recognize as healthy.

Another more prominent common denominator among the highly intelligent protagonists is that all three have worked as professionals who attempt to restore their constituents' lives, bodies, or minds; in other words, they all are or have been professional nurturers, healers. The first protagonist is a social worker, a recognized expert on shelters for abused women; the second is a highly respected, highly skilled doctor and director of a school for autistic children; Paola, the third, was a rehabilitation nurse during World War II, an experience she considered “the best time of her life. … At night she read books on anatomy and the new knowledge made her happy. No more poetry: muscles, bones, ligaments, joints, the flow of blood—not a metaphor but a real substance that could cause movement, whose failure could prevent movement” (204).

WORDS AND PERSONHOOD

Each of the protagonists has a stubborn penchant for living in the present, for avoiding histrionics, and for a certain candid modesty in her private musings. Of particular consequence is the protagonists' shared preoccupation with the meaning and implications of words in their and others' lives. That Gordon is making consistent use of this preoccupation is evidenced by the number of italicized words one sees when fanning the pages of the collection. A careful examination of these occurrences shows the variety of their usage. Sometimes, we notice, their occurrences are rather normal, seemingly inevitable. For example, the first protagonist, while describing the first time she met Father Clement Buckley, moves forward in time to reflect, “That's the kind of thing Clement and I talk about. The term godforsaken. How terrible it is. The meaning of forsake. Or why it is that cyclone fences, especially the barbed-wire tops, always make me think of the Rosenbergs. He can be so quick at understanding things like that and so infuriatingly slow at understanding something obvious” (14-15). Later, she muses that “Faith and deceit aren't words Clement can place together in a sentence, keep in his mind at one time” (19). Likewise, while thinking about the early years after her father had exiled her to a cousin's home in America, the third protagonist, Paola, recalls, “Her cousin was a doctor; his wife was the daughter of a man who owned factories. They had no children. This rich American woman had brought him to her home from Italy convinced that he would prosper. And he did. Prosperity: a choking word. Now, sixty years later, her throat is thick with it. Prosperous” (199).

Sometimes the word emphases occur in surprising contexts, such as the first protagonist's musings about those post-lovemaking “quiet times of grooming or of tending. ‘Let me wash your hair.’ ‘Your shoulders are so tense.’ And sleep. Holding, moving apart from. Waking. ‘There you are.’ Waking perhaps to penetration. The surprise. ‘There you are. And here I am with you.’ With. The beautiful and rare word. With” (63). In the third novella, a somewhat similar emphasis on a single word is handled like a swelling crescendo and sudden diminuendo in music: while trying to write a letter, “For my son, to be read after my death,” Paola begins: “‘It happened when I was fifteen years old,’ she writes. But what was it? She sees the small word—it—the enemy, hard as a bullet. Was it the death, their history, the history of Italy, the history of poetry, the history of men and women? Whose name should be included: Goethe, Leopardi, his parents, her aunt, Mussolini, a host of female martyrs, the Virgin Mary, her dead mother, her father whom she loved above all things? It. She puts the pencil down. She rips up the paper” (252). An equally haunting, three-word examination surfaces as the second protagonist agonizes about the difficulties in explaining menstruation to her pubescent autistic girl patients and the harrowing realities of their sexuality: “We don't say to them. ‘Don't worry, we'll see to it that you're barren.’ Certain words terrify me: I'd rather not hear them coming from my mouth, entering the air, which after all I have to breathe again and would prefer not to have filled with terror. The terrible emptiness of the word barren. A dry pebble in a huge rusted bin, silent, unliving, jostled accidentally by who knows what. … Barren: the aftermath of an evisceration, the inhuman blank. A word we don't use for a man or boy. The word sterile holds nothing like the same terror. Infertile: just an accident, an oversight, a small inessential minus, a mistake. There is nothing curable or scientific that the word barren suggests. Barren is ancient, irreversible: a curse, a fate” (89).

Occasionally, the protagonists' attention to words is not italicized, an omission that can create an unexpected emphasis. An example of this is one of Gordon's most memorable and characteristically logical sequences: “Why should we call anything about sex love? I've loved some of the people I've had sex with. I haven't had sex with most of the people I have loved” (49). A more intriguing example occurs almost at the end of the third novella, when Paola, half-asleep, half-dreaming, decides that “If she could describe the woman [herself] lying on the bed, then she could believe herself free. She begins with a single sentence. ‘A woman is lying on the bed.’ The simplicity of the sentence relaxes her. What it describes hurts nobody. She feels a little safer, and she wants to make herself feel safer still. She tells herself to describe the woman on the bed. ‘The woman on the bed is old and small, but youthful for her age.’ The breathing around her is quieter now. Because she has made herself into something she can describe. Something that language fits. Something that language can explain” (241).

The decision to call so much attention to the protagonists' attention to words is not arbitrary. First of all, the passages show how Gordon puts her own obsession with words to remarkable use in and for the development of her characters as well as the issues she wants to rethink (and that she wants us to rethink) with particular patience and care. At the same time, such passages are an unusual aperture into Gordon's craft and logic: they reveal something of the most private dynamics within her love affair with language and craft, and in them, we hear her hearing, savoring, considering, weighing, discarding, and rearranging them word by word by phrase by sentence. Then we watch her broaden that inquiry into the daily ways in which the inherent splendors, limitations, and dangers within language reveal themselves. Examples of the first two have been given; two characteristically linked examples of the latter are found in the second protagonist's private musings: “What happens to language frightens me, and what happens to truthfulness when words seem to signify the opposite of what is intended, when what seems to be candor is an elaborate screen to keep people from what really is the case” (129-30). Then, the protagonist zeros in on the primary questions about death and life that “no one could ask … of the person they live beside because the answers would be too unbearable to live with” (130). But Gordon moves still further into a questioning of language itself and its arbitrary connections with perceived realities and selfhood; although this is addressed in all three novellas, its most careful exploration is in the second novella, where the protagonist discusses autism and her children patients. One of her most intriguing illustrations in this discussion includes these quiet, haunting sentences: “They speak only the present tense. … Not believing in the future, they often find it difficult to express desire. When you ask them what they want, they may answer with any word at all. Today, when we asked a little boy what he wanted to eat, he answered, ‘Pandemonium’” (89), a riveting metaphor if one begins to reconsider language itself as well as personhood.

When we study the word- and language-focused passages as they occur throughout the novellas, we can see how the individual examinations of words and language accrete and merge; they lay the quiet, almost transparent groundwork, the gesso coat (to use a painter's strategy), of Gordon's larger inquiry into personhood and its daily revelations in the words and silences (and the recollections of words and silences) of pivotal relationships. With Gordon's skill, five words can be enough to summarize all three protagonists' “tricky navigation[s] through daily life” (Hunnewell interview, 25). For the first protagonist, all that has formed the life of her lover, Father Clement Buckley, and that now dictates their life together comes down to two words: “all that” (16). For the second protagonist, the entire conscious and unconscious shaping of her adult life was simply: “all this” (105). And for Paola, the whole shape of sixty-three years of her life was determined by the tragedy, the “It” (252).

Thus, one word, a few words, are how and what and as much as we know about who we are, who another is, what a thing, an event, is. And the stories of the stories that come together in The Rest of Life are Gordon's reminders that both personhood and language are inherently porous and ambiguous, that personhood is the spoken and unspoken language of our lives and loves, that they are “mated, but in the way of our age [and species], partial” (155). But one further suggestion, a kind of cryptic affirmation, lurks under the recognitions of and abstracted words for human and linguistic flaws and limitations. This, perhaps, can be best summarized by altering one of Lauro's slippery answers to an interviewer's question about why he liked being in the midst of dangerous, chaotic revolutions: “I've never felt as comfortable in [words and relationships] that are truly impermeable” (131).

Notes

1. See Louisa Ermelino's review of The Rest of Life in “Picks & Pans,” People, 30 August 1993, 30-1.

2. Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (New York: Viking, 1993).

3. See also Alma Bennett on Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life, in Masterplots II: Women's Literature (6 vols.), edited by Frank N. Magill (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995), 1950-4.

4. Susannah Hunnewell, “What It's Like to Live in a Female Body,” New York Times Book Review, 8 August 1993, 25; hereafter cited in the text as Hunnewell interview. Note that the interview is on the final page of Alison Lurie's review of The Rest of Life.

5. Patrick H. Samway, “An Interview with Mary Gordon,” America, 14 May 1994, 15. Note that in the questions and answers regarding the third novella, “The Rest of Life,” the protagonist's name is misspelled: “Paula,” rather than the correct “Paola.”

6. Janette Turner Hospital, “Body Maps,” London Review of Books, 7 April 1994, 23.

7. Alison Lurie, “Love Has Its Consequences,” New York Times Book Review, 8 August 1993, 25.

8. Gordon's use of Turin may have been consciously or unconsciously suggested by her trip there to interview Natalia Ginzburg and Gordon's subsequent essay, “Surviving History,” New York Times Magazine, 25 March 1990, 42-3, 46, 62.

9. Gordon uses these kinds of small resonances, such as references to the Orpheus myth, in various ways. In “Immaculate Man,” Orpheus appears only in a serial list to symbolize a woman's need for solidity in any relationship with a man (19). In “Living at Home” Gordon briefly pairs Eurydice with Lot's wife to suggest how, after the death of a loved one or a relationship, we often fight the realization that “there is no going back” (164). In “The Rest of Life,” Gordon's use of the myth is more important. See, for example, pages 189-90 in which Paola's poem about Orpheus and Eurydice confuses who breaks the forbidden injunction (do not look back) and comes to symbolize her naïveté, intelligence, and refusal to join Leo in suicide.

   According to Greek mythology, we recall, the musician-poet Orpheus goes to the Underworld to try to retrieve his bride, Eurydice, who died of snakebite on their wedding day. Having charmed the denizens of the Underworld with his music, Orpheus is allowed to lead Eurydice out of the Underworld of death, but he is given an injunction that he must not look back at her until they reach the earth's surface. Just before reaching their destination, however, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, and she disappears—permanently, this time—back into the Underworld. Inconsolable after this second loss, Orpheus is eventually torn to pieces by frenzied female religious devotees, but his lyre and head are salvaged, a salvaging that will be also echoed by Paola at the end of the novella.