[In the following review, Caldwell praises The Rest of Life, observing that the three novellas express a strong sense of voice, insight, and memory.]

In the realm of intention, as any behaviorist will tell you, there's a world of difference between a wink and a twitch. Charting that vast landscape of meaning is what ethnography is all about, and what anthropologists call “thick description”—an elaborate assessment of ritual, motive and emotion. Writers of fiction, if the least bit contemplative, practice this trick of perception without a second thought; they know that behind the subtlest of gestures lie fields of intrigue. But thick description seems to me the very essence of Mary Gordon's fiction. She imposes layer upon layer of emotional fabric onto her characters, until they seem both utterly familiar and bottomless in their unknowability. For all of Gordon's sojourns into wider worlds—from the corridors of domesticity to the far-flung regions of faith—she always has an eye on the particular: the solitary glove, the glass left on the end table. In Gordon's hands, a woman dusting an old photograph can summon half the frailties of history. As a form, the novella may especially lend itself to this large specificity, and in The Rest of Life, Gordon accomplishes it in a number of ways. Voice is what drives the first novella, insight the second, memory the third. Each possesses an almost obsessive introspection that plunges past the sunlit surfaces of ordinary human interaction. By the end of The Rest of Life, you feel as though you've been riding for hours on a slow-moving train, listening to a stranger talking in the dark.

“Immaculate Man” takes the topically startling subject of a priest's ongoing love affair and tells it from the woman's point of view—thus rendering it so intimately that the usual expectations of shock and despair are superseded. “I suppose it won't end well,” she tells us early on, but it's not the foreboding of that sentence that informs us—it's the tentativeness. We know that our first-person narrator is a shy, resigned woman, someone who read a lot of Russian novels as a girl, thus imbuing her world view with the normal occurrence of sorrow. A divorced woman in her 40s, she works for a battered women's shelter; her kids are loving but nonchalant. “This is slightly on the dark side of the national average, I suppose,” she says about her life, “but it's not tragic.” The voice is chronically uncertain, but it's also rich and full, almost silently rebellious. One begins to see gradually, from behind her eyes, how she became so enmeshed with the dear Father Clement—now simply Clement, a man so guileless that he sings along with the radio to the score from “Oklahoma!”

Who is this fallen hero, this eternally hopeful man who understands how much comfort we all need, but who strikes his dog too hard when angry? How can he live within the secret duplicity of his love for this woman and his vows of celibacy? The details of his life are everywhere: in his words of consolation to the women in the shelter, in the happy, stumbling way he tells the story of the Ascension, in his adoration of his lover, who is five years older. Protective to the end is Boniface, Clement's mentor, now dying in a nursing home and conspiratorially connected with the narrator. “We stole too much history,” he tells her enigmatically, without context. “Time to give it back.”

If “Immaculate Man” is abundant with such mysteries, so, too, does “Living at Home” see the world through a prism of meaning. The woman protagonist is a Jewish physician who works with autistic children; she lives in London, with a war correspondent named Lauro who enjoys shuttling between Third World revolutions. He is—a near-perfect detail—five inches shorter than she. She has had three husbands; she is patient, even heroic, with her autistic charges. But she knows this really isn't true—merely that she likes the quiet, understands their fear, their search for self-containment. And she understands the difficulties of an ordinary life. What feats of courage might it take, then, to suffer the “pathos of displacement” she sees in her children every day?

“Living at Home” is true to its title, spiritually and exactingly concerned with the premise of safe shelter. If the woman's mother, after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1935, took solace from her material possessions, she needed reassurance that “it was possible for some things to outlast horror.” Lauro will leave for the front lines at the drop of a hat, but keeps photos of himself—normally a modest man—hung all over the living room, as if to remind him of his presence in the world. Just beyond this clearing in the forest, the place we all call home, is an estrangement that can happen to anyone. “You have to understand,” the woman's weary mother explains about an empty life. “I don't like anything.”

“The Rest of Life” is heavy with the comprehension of everyday despair, as well as the weaponry provided to clear the range: inner strength, sheer resignation, the promise of a child's laughter. Sometimes Gordon's prose suffers under such noble weight, and a torpor begins to overwhelm the grand melancholy of what seems a fixed view. This lassitude of fate feels the most problematic in “Living at Home,” which, in its near-claustrophobic intimacy, occasionally seems more enervating than sorrowful.

Perhaps because it alone is relayed in the third person, the title novella possesses a studied otherness that enhances its depth. Paola, a 78-year-old Italian-American widow, is returning to her birthplace in Turin after more than 60 years; her son and his fiance have brought her here as a gift. But what Paola has told no one is that she left Italy in shame when she was 15, after a thwarted suicide pact with her lover left him dead. Paola's father sent her to America, where she married a decent man, had children, endured. The Rest of Life, far sadder than its title implies, has been a kind of broken penance for the tragic folly of her youth.

Shame, Genesis tells us, is the downside of self-awareness, and it permeates “The Rest of Life” like blood on linen. But Paola is strong; she has the presence of mind to realize that history is a commonality of narrative, and that “there is some line running through her body like a wick.” This sense of time and continuity will redeem her life, for it holds within it the idea of her own mercy—almost as certain as the image of her father, when love was still stronger than anything else.

Paola has the chance to learn that anguish doesn't have to last: that “blood will not adhere to the rough bark of the old trees.” “The Rest of Life” is exquisite in its sense of history and personal sorrow, and Paola's journey seems almost more noble than tears. Taken as a whole, the three novellas in The Rest of Life are justifiably fine work. But Paola's story is high testament to the form: an ode to memory nearly undone by a brilliant grief.

SPEAK, MEMORY

“This must bring back a lot, Mama,” he says.

She looks out the window of the train. Through the window: her childhood trees: poplars, cypresses, furled in upon themselves like rolled umbrellas.

Bring back from where? And to what?

She's always surprised at how free people feel to speak of memory. They imagine it a liquid, mobile, a stream that flows in one direction only. They speak of it as though they could return to something navigable, something they can enter any time at will. No sense for them that the small, fragile boat in which they find themselves will fail to protect them. No possibility for them of the wrecked craft, the splinters and the skeleton hurled up. Memory: the cataract, the overwhelming flood. And the freezing power of horror, of shock, when memory stops dead and nothing moves on the gray, windless plain, the place of stone, blind stone, and you inhabit it because you must, it is the only place, you must choose it or death by drowning.

Mary Gordon, from “The Rest of Life”