[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Prose praises Gordon's portrayal of complex female characters, commenting that the stories are engaging and thought-provoking.]

If, as Chekhov wrote, a story runs on “the engine of he and she,” Mary Gordon's new book, The Rest of Life, is firing on all cylinders. The three novellas that make up this thoughtful collection are about men and women, sex and power, the body and the spirit, what connects us and what separates us, what we deserve and what we owe. The first of these fictions, “Immaculate Man,” is narrated by a social worker who deals with battered and abused women, and who embarks on a serious love affair with a co-worker, a priest who is a virgin at the age of 43. The narrator of the second novella, “Living at Home,” also works with the damaged; she's a doctor who specializes in the care of autistic children, while her nervy, charismatic Italian journalist-lover reports from dangerous global hot spots. In the final, title piece, an elderly woman returns home to the Northern Italian city she left more than 60 years before when she and her first lover made a suicide pact—which he kept and she didn't.

These novellas don't tell us stories so much as they reveal to us whole lives. They're more discursive than heavily plotted; they read like meditations on the histories they disclose and on the ethical, philosophical and psychological questions that these histories raise. It's as if these three situations each presents a separate puzzle that the writer keeps assembling and taking apart in search of a clue to something important.

Though the novellas stand alone, it's intriguing to read them together; one is struck by what these women and men have—and don't have—in common. For the narrators in the first two stories, love has made them hostage to fortune, conscious of transience and impermanence. They worry that their lovers will leave them—for someone else or through death. If the love in the final novel is the most destructive and searing, the most life-changing and unchanged, it's also the love in which the abandonment—the death—has already occurred. All three of the women have children and are in varying degrees conscious of the differences between their love for their children and what they feel for a lover. So in “Immaculate Man,” a woman's most quotidian moments with her family constitute a secret life in which her lover cannot participate:

As a mother I am unrecognizable to him, maybe dangerous or shocking. He doesn't see what happens between me and the children when he isn't there: their kindness when I come home dead tired, their discussions on my bed late at night about injustice or their fears, our singing in the car, their fierce defenses of each other, the comfort they go to each other for that they can get from no one else.

All three novellas share a concern with ways in which love and sex tip the balance of separateness and connectedness, freedom and dependence, fragmentation and integrity. “Living at Home” keeps reworking this equation, factoring in the elements—the body, the home, material possessions—that keep us in prison and keep us safe. Its articulate, analytical narrator finds that her work with autistic children helps her understand the relation between our most primal horrors—and domesticity:

So often the children feel uncertainty that the parts of the body belong together; they have a fear of fragmentation, a terror, literal for them, that the one thing called a body will fly apart and scatter all over the world. Isn't this perhaps why ‘we’ take such care, lavish such attention, insist we cannot live without our love, which we think will keep us all of a piece, intact?

One is grateful to Mary Gordon for writing female characters who have eventful pasts, sexual histories and desires, interesting inner lives. And it's a pleasure to see her dealing with issues that have engaged her since her first novel, Final Payments. She has always, it seems, been fascinated by ideas of guilt, sacrifice and responsibility, by how much we (especially women) can, so to speak, call our lives our own—how much we owe other people: our parents, our children, our lovers, strangers. In the moral universe her characters inhabit, the poles are not so much God and the Devil as selfishness and selflessness; meanwhile her characters are always questioning the wisdom and utility of self-sacrifice, especially for women. (When Mary Gordon writes about sex, as in these three novellas, it's often from that perspective; the narrator of “Immaculate Man” wonders about the relation between pleasure and selfishness.) In the moving title novella, these conflicts are ultimately mediated by the passage of time, and the grace of forgiveness.

The Rest of Life is highly readable, but never light or trivial. There's something refreshing and encouraging about how deep these novellas mean to go, how much of substance they're trying to get at. They're engaging and make you think—they're bracingly serious.