[In the following review of Temporary Shelter, Lee comments that the best stories in this volume are written in a distinct voice that is both disturbing and comforting, although some are flawed by an overly solemn tone.]

Mary Gordon—a remarkable American novelist—has always written about safety, and the perils of safety. “Think of the appeal of sanctuary, the pure shelter”, says Isabel, the heroine of her first novel Final Payments (1978). She has looked after her sick father until she is thirty, in the shelter of his fierce love and faith, admired for her goodness by family priests and neighbours. What to the normal world seems deprivation has to her seemed privilege.

As a child, when I read about the Middle Ages I was fascinated by the idea that there was one automatic safe place, the simple inhabitance of which guaranteed safety from accusing mobs and ravening bandits. I had won myself a place there as the daughter of my father … I had bought sanctuary by giving up youth and freedom, sex and life.

Clearly a dangerous bargain; but to leave the sanctuary in search of those ordinary goods, after her father's death, is also dangerous.

In The Company of Women (1980), “Felicitas” is brought up under the influence of an austere orthodox priest, the mentor of her mother and her mother's close friends (these extended Catholic matriarchies recur in the stories). Trying, like Isabel, for a “normal” modern life, she moves into what turns out to be a very makeshift shelter, a (splendidly satirized) 1960s commune. In both novels, veneration, the desire for inclusion, the wish not to be “an émigré in some strange city where she looked with longing at the windows of strangers” are felt, unfashionably, as particularly female attributes.

In Men and Angels, Gordon's most recent novel, the safe place is a marriage. (Again, this goes interestingly against the grain of much recent American women's writing, where the family house, or the house of marriage, is the place that needs to be left, not preserved.) Anne is researching an American woman painter (a kind of Mary Cassatt figure) who left her country, defied her father and neglected her son for her work. Anne herself, by contrast, is deeply engaged in the balancing act between the family and the study, aware of the rash optimism in trying to make of home “some sort of sanctuary so that nothing untoward might happen there”. The “untoward” intrudes as a home help called Laura, seemingly quiet and orderly, in fact (we are let inside her frightening mind) a religious fanatic from an appalling home, dangerously fixated on Anne. This kind of woman recurs in all the novels: the unlovable religious extremist, whose terrible desire to belong and be loved, be “inside”, is a grotesque travesty of the central character's ordinary need for receiving and maintaining safety and protection.

Mary Gordon's first and very striking collection of stories pursues the theme, as its title, Temporary Shelter, and the titles of individual stories—“Safe”, “Out of the Fray”, “Violation”, “The Imagination of Disaster”—make plain. As before they draw much of their power from a negotiation between a discarded structure of belief and the difficulty of making another, equally firm order out of human materials. She is a writer from a Catholic background (energetically exploited in the stories) who is trying—and whose women characters are trying—to reshape the orthodoxy of salvation in secular terms. If religion can't be your safe place, what can? For most women, still, marriage, family, children. But what kind of sanctuary can possibly be made now out of this vestigial structure, “an ancient relationship in a ruined age”?

Several of the stories deal very well and carefully with the foolhardiness of setting up such anachronistic shelters. In “Now I am Married”, the second wife, visiting her new husband's English family, listens to the warning voices of other women, trying to make sense of the idea of marriage. In “Out of the Fray”, the new wife's meeting with the husband's oldest friend (herself irrevocably damaged by a desertion) makes the whole arrangement teeter under the pressure of the past. There are no reassuring older models: a loyal old man trying to keep house for his senile wife makes dreadful reading. One unlikely and poignant story has a retired magician's wife trying to protect her husband from doing tricks in public that, with his failing eyesight, he can no longer control; and it's as if, in all these, making a marriage last is as ticklish an act as turning a pearl into a flower or making silk scarves change colour.

These stories of risk themselves run the risk of sounding too solemn, of making bourgeois domestic habits (having a meal with one's husband, putting the baby to bed) stand too portentously for a dying civilization. The prose pieces, autobiographical in feeling, about her small family, are touching and truthful on desire in marriage, on mother love, on the shifts and phases inside long relationships. But they tend to be too weightily grave, as in “I can keep them [husband and child] from so little; it must be the shape of my life to keep them at least from the danger I could bring them.” It's a tone that works better in the novels.

But the cooler, more savage stories are excellent. They are told from the viewpoint of solitary or bereaved children (Mary Gordon is fruitfully influenced by Elizabeth Bowen here) threatened by adult secrets and disasters. A great wave of unseen, guessed-at violence and dismay is waiting, just out of sight, to break in on the “shelter”. (And it therefore has to be asked whether it is better to protect children from what's outside, what might be inside.) Nora, a crippled girl who is in several of the best stories, brought up by a circle of powerful Irish-American aunts, intent on overcoming her disability and succeeding in the unfriendly world, turns her back on the weak or damaged women in the family. Other peoples' pain damages you; pity makes you weak. A girl whose father has just died is told off by her Aunt Lena: “So don't spend the whole time crying. Nobody can stand to have a kid around that all she ever does is cry.” To feel sorry because terrible things have happened is to put yourself at risk, as in one marvellous story called “The Murderer Guest”, in which the parents of a ten-year-old girl invite a woman to stay who has killed her husband in self-defence.

Because of the fragility of orderly, secure structures, a high value is given to order, to making a good shape and understanding it well. (Conversely, there is an appalled fascination with squalor and chaos). Appropriately, then, Mary Gordon's writing is exceptionally discriminating, formal and measured. Sometimes it sounds too stately and crafted—the “pendulous ungirded breasts” of the Irish neighbour, the wife who thinks it “a great and kingly mercy” that her husband has kept his regular job. But at its best this is a distinguished voice, unusual in being at once alarming and consolatory, writing with special feeling about ordinary things that matter.