[In the following review, MacCurtain criticizes Temporary Shelter, asserting that its narratives seem contrived and poorly structured.]

“Nora remembered how they had laughed together. John and Delia were the only ones she knew who laughed like that and who were married.” Apartness, anxiety, an apprehensive sense that life is happening somewhere else and that not much of it is pleasant, informs many of the stories in Mary Gordon's Temporary Shelter. Nora, a child from whose perspective at different ages three of these stories are told, has reason to feel apart. Born with one leg shorter than the other, she is excluded from the games of other children, and as a young woman is denied the opportunity to be a teacher. From behind the shield of her handicap she observes her family and their relationships. Her conclusion from her observation is a grim conviction that life follows a law of diminishing returns.

Certainly John and Delia are the only two laughers in this collection, and even their laughter is a remembered thing, for Delia has died in childbirth. Humour, “the handmaid of sorrow and fear,” as Flann O'Brien called it, has no place in these interior monologues. Mary Gordon's exploration of the inner hearts of her central characters is carefully and delicately done, but the people with whom they speak and relate appear to be almost lay figures. Insofar as they exist at all, it is to give substance to the anxieties of the characters whose existences they serve.

The effect of this concentrated exploration of the individual heart is to leave these narratives inert. Dialogue does not advance any action or situation: it seems “planted” in order to confirm the central figure in the accuracy of her perception. But Mary Gordon's incidental psychological accuracies will not substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, the ability to keep an organised set of images moving forward to some resolution. In these stories all situations appear to have been rigged to confirm a fear or to justify an anxiety that has been immovably there from the start.