[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Weinman applauds the depth and compassion of Gordon's stories.]

The novella, fiction's halfway house, needs the short story's focus and the novel's depth. In each of the three novellas comprising The Rest of Life, Mary Gordon's focus is a single character. Her depth comes from writing out of the high heart of compassion that never falls into sentimentality.

In the title novella, old Paola returns to Italy with her American son. Her life has been dedicated to forgetting. She survived a teenage suicide pact. Her boyfriend's death and the love affair it revealed had shamed her family into banishing her to America. Now, returning to Turino, she relives the old guilts and self-disgust, made poignant by love. The remembered love scenes are very simple and completely beautiful. In other more sombre and violent scenes, Gordon's unflinchingly appropriate language provides the core of truthfulness, the tact of good writing.

“Living at Home” is intellectually more ambitious. Its narrator, who works with autistic children, is apparently explaining how, after three failed marriages, she has found the perfect partner, a journalist who continually leaves her for appalling war zones. In fact, she is revealing her own autistic tendencies, the uncertainty of boundaries between self and non-self. But because the passages on autism are long, the incidents short and too neatly exemplary, and the narrator's voice humourless and detached, the effect is of a brilliant essay on autism rather than fiction with autism as its central metaphor.

The book opens with “Immaculate Man,” and this is wonderful. It is the story of a social worker's love affair with a Catholic priest. She is middle-aged and resigned, and Clement falls into her life like a miracle with strings attached. The plot seems made for cuteness: she loves Clement for his innocence, which their affair will end. But as Gordon writes, the ironies come sharp as acid rain.

The bleeding-heart social worker relentlessly judges herself. On a bus she's drawn into the unfair arrest of a passenger whose only offence has been to light a cigarette. Though she won't bear witness against him, she doesn't speak up in his defence. The calm accumulation of detail is devastating: the reader feels complicit in her silence. And the novella is funny, too. Clement's poem to his mother is a perfect Hopkins parody: “Hand, mine, mother, Make Christ's blood / Flesh, from the bulk of bread, real stuff / Earth-stuff, food-stuff, God / Your son this does.”

Perfectly awful. I wish I'd written it. Instead, I've had the pleasure of reading this great novella, the most genuine and generous praise of a man's love for a woman, by a woman, that I've ever read.