[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Messud describes the stories as both serious and accessible, and asserts that the title novella is the most moving in the volume.]

Mary Gordon's is not a showy talent, but it is no less powerful for that. The author of Final Payments, The Company of Women and The Other Side has, in these works, addressed the endlessly absorbing questions of faith, of family relationships and of gender dynamics—in short, the more serious stuff of life. In her new book [The Rest of Life,] a collection of three crisp, ostensibly unrelated novellas, Gordon again turns her compassionate eye on the dilemmas of existence: what could be said to link these disparate narratives is the overriding question of what makes us who we are, at any given stage, and they could loosely be described as examining the future, the present and the past in turn.

The first of the trio, “Immaculate Man”, is about a nameless narrator's affair with a virginal Catholic priest named Clement. A middle-aged divorcee who, like her lover, works with battered women, she had renounced the idea that she would ever again be desired: “Living, knowing your body is of no concern to anyone but yourself. You worry that one day you might get sick, that you'll become a nuisance or a burden. But that's all. … You grow to expect that, you give up expecting anything else.”

But Clement and his mentor, an aged homosexual priest named Boniface, have introduced her to the idea of hope, and have at once altered and threatened her conception of herself and of her future. To have love, so unexpectedly, also means to dread its loss: “He gave me back my life, one part of it, I mean”, she says. “He gave me hope. Making love to him is such a hopeful thing for me. It would be terrible to lose that, to have to admit that the thing I called hopefulness was just misnamed. … I don't want this to happen. But I can see how likely it is that it will.” Having tasted the pleasures of sex, Clement will, she fears, abandon her for someone younger and more attractive: it is not something, perhaps, that would have frightened the person she was, or had thought herself to be; but her relationship with Clement has transformed her.

The London-based doctor who narrates the second piece, “Living at Home”, does not fear abandonment: indeed, in her relationship with Lauro, an Italian journalist who reports on Third World revolutions, she has sought out someone who will abandon her repeatedly. Such separation and coming together again reassure her that she is alive, in a way two previous stable marriages have failed to do. Her preoccupation, rather, is with attempting to reconcile all the selves that a person is at any particular time, a difficulty she shares with the autistic children she treats in her work. They “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 whole-heartedly the rest of us pretend to understand.”

And yet, she does not pretend: which is the real Lauro, she wonders, the unfamiliar portrait in public interviews or the man who shares her bed? The fearless reporter who faces death and disease in far-flung places, or the creature reduced to a gibbering wreck by a visit to the dentist? And is the self that loves Lauro her true self at last, or, as with her former relationships, will she come to feel that she has been “living through only a part of life, something we may later call a mistake”?

The book's title story, “The Rest of Life”, is about an elderly woman returning to the site of the grave adolescent “mistake” which has blighted her entire life. Brought back to Italy from America by her son and his fiancée, she is forced to re-live her secret tragedy: at fifteen, she entered into a suicide pact with her boyfriend from which she fled at the last moment. The boy's death brought shame on her family, and her father sent her away to relatives in the United States, where she worked, married, bore children and grew old in a daze, feeling her life to be stolen, ruined. On her return to her now unrecognizable childhood haunts, “she sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. … That there is some line running through her body like a wick.” Eventually, in an epiphanic moment, she is able to accommodate and understand the selves that she has been, and to feel gratitude for the life that she has had.

This third novella—the only one with a third-person narrative—is the strongest and most moving of the three, perhaps because the others are without any framework of external events and, in the manner of dramatic monologue, are more static because of this. “Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home” have more the tenor of the extended short story, whereas “The Rest of Life” is absolutely at home in its form. There are strengths in all of the pieces, not least in the unwaveringly honest and accurate eye of their author. Mary Gordon is rare in being both ultimately serious and absolutely accessible, an achievement which this volume confirms.