[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Hughes praises Gordon's prose for its high quality and precision.]

Three rich, precise novellas make up Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life. Each one comprises a meditation by a woman, no longer young, on her relationship with a particular lover. In “Immaculate Man”, a middle-aged social worker recalls how her job as a carer and comforter of battered women has brought her to the extraordinary position of lover to a Catholic priest.

At the age of 43, Father Clement, welfare worker and member of the Paracletists, has never touched a woman. With wonderment, gratitude and resignation—for she knows that she must soon lose him to a tauter, flirtier woman—the narrator describes Clement's delighted exploration of her body. And while she initiates him into a world of physical sensation, he gently leads her from small-town Congregationalism to an understanding of an older, richer faith.

In “Living At Home”, the narrator is a doctor who specialises in the treatment of autistic children. Herself a stranger to any settled culture—her parents are German-Jewish, she is Anglo-American—she explores her current relationship with a restless Italian foreign correspondent. The parallels are striking. While the journalist Lauro makes constant forays into distant and dangerous territories in an attempt to clarify the unknown, the narrator spends her life trying to illuminate the horrified, hostile world of the autistic child. For both doctor and patient the skin of language that protects the self from the social world has been stretched to breaking point.

In “The Rest of Life”, an elderly Italian-American woman is taken by her son to her childhood home outside Turin. While for the boy and his Nigerian fiancée this is a safe, sentimental journey, for the old woman it is a return to terror. For she recalls to herself how, at the age of 15, she entered into a Romeo and Juliet suicide pact with her young lover. But while he went through with it, she did not. To escape the shame and blame, her beloved father put her on a train to America, and she saw neither him, nor her home, again.

Gordon uses these three internal monologues to return to some of the themes that she explored so lyrically in her earlier full-length work. There is, for instance, the tension between the old world and the new, between history and modernity, Catholicism and Protestantism. She explores what it is to be a traveller and an uneasy settler in someone's else's culture. In the process, the failure of language to communicate emotional states is compulsively charted. In the third novella, the elderly Paola decides to tell her son all about “it” and, a split second later, realises that “it” is too vast, boundless and subtle ever to be understood by another.

What continues to make Gordon's work so memorable is the sheer quality of the prose. Because these novellas all represent journeys into memory and meditation, there is little opportunity for dialogue. Instead, Gordon relies on minute observation and a personal, poetic language to create narratives that are as dense, mysterious and compelling as any more extrovert tale.