[In the following review, Turner considers the stories in The Rest of Life to be original, insightful, and entertaining.]

Mary Gordon has a name that sounds like the name of many other women writers. The titles of her novels—Final Payments, Men and Angels, The Other Side—sound much the same as the titles of other women writers' books. The biographies on her bookjackets mention that the author is “best-selling” and has in the past won a Readers' Digest Award. But then, haven't they all? You should not let any of these things confuse you. For Mary Gordon is very special indeed. The Rest of Life is composed of three novellas. The first, “Immaculate Man”, is about a woman who gets romantically involved with a Roman Catholic priest. You have barely started reading before you come across this: “It's very easy for me to think that other people are right, more right than I am anyway, or that at least they have more right to things, which is why I always give up arguments … Why would I go on with something when it seemed clear that the other person wanted so much to be winning?” There is something so very clear and original about the way this thought is put, you would like to start all over in order to think about it again. Only you can't, because you're already totally caught up in Mary Gordon's unfolding patterns of thought.

This is the sort of thing that always happens with a Mary Gordon story. The setting is unpromisingly bourgeois-sounding: in “Living at Home”, we are introduced to a doctor who has a glamorous foreign correspondent as her live-in lover; in the title story, we meet an elderly Italian-American woman whose son is taking her on a visit to the old country by way of “a first-class compartment on a train”. But then, before you can say Anita Brookner, Mary Gordon's piercing ethical eye takes control of the narrative, opening strange, fresh vistas on everything it sees. The language is simple and uncluttered, belying the complexity of the ideas it contains. Your mind seems to stretch into new shapes as you read, as if tickled and coaxed by a warm yet bracing breeze.

The foreign correspondent gets interviewed by glossy magazines. “In ordinary life,” his partner thinks, “no one asks the sort of bold questions interviewers ask: ‘What does death mean to you? Why do you go to places in which it is so easy to die?’ No one could ask these questions of the person they live beside because the answers would be too unbearable to live with.” Paola, the elderly woman, has never told her son that she was run out of Italy as a teenager after agreeing to a suicide pact which she survived, but which her young lover did not. Instead of standing up for her, her beloved father abandoned his daughter to shame. “So she's learned this: shame was a stronger force than love.”

Elsewhere in her story, Paola remembers the day she first slept with her lover, a poet who thought he knew all there was to know. about love and death and everything else. “There was so much that neither of us knew. A whole body of ignorance, complete as a branch of knowledge: the science of what was not known, guessed at from books and paintings, things that didn't move or grow or smell or change.” In this lovely image, Mary Gordon offers us a clue as to how she organises her narrative method in general. She does not write only of things that have happened, roads that were taken, choices that were made. This is what most writers do, and this is why life, by their way of looking at it, seems so affected and dull.

But Mary Gordon slices back into events, ideas, decisions, accepting that what has happened has happened, but at the same time reopening them back to be gone over anew.

When you learn that she was brought up a Roman Catholic, this vivid way she has of conceptualising moral behaviour might appear suddenly to be explained. But is it? In the books of most famously Catholic writers, of Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O'Connor or Graham Greene, religion is represented as a mysterious thing, used to lend an attractively weird light to characters who without it might appear narrow and thin. As George Orwell once said, you get the idea that hell functions as “a sort of high-class night-club”, glamorous, elitist and rather pretentious. If you're a Catholic, you'll just understand the enormity of it. If you're not, you can go and freeze outside the door.

There is none of this sort of stuff in Mary Gordon's books. Indeed, there is no mention of God or sin or goodness or guilt—all the usual mystical trappings—either. In their place comes only active, rigorous, all-forgiving thought. The only thing at all mysterious about Mary Gordon's work is how a writer so very original and serious manages to be so unputdownably entertaining as well.