[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Pols comments on the theme of relationships between women and men in Gordon's collection.]

I was barely 40 pages into Mary Gordon's new book, The Rest of Life, before I started getting a sinking feeling about my sex.

My group of creeping-towards-30 female friends spends an inordinate amount of time discussing our insecurities about men and lasting relationships. But I've assumed those feelings were going to gradually fade with time and acquired wisdom. According to Gordon, I'm wrong. Dead wrong.

Ways to lose men, and ways to lose yourself through men, are the themes holding together these three beautifully written novellas. Collectively, these stories about women and relationships are a painfully true look at the restraints women place on themselves, hoping to please men.

What I found disturbing is that two of these women are in their 40s and the third is 78. Is that the way it's going to be? Will my women friends and I be sitting on the beach in 20 years, having the same conversations about men, except we'll be watching our children instead of our boyfriends skip rocks across the water?

FLEETING HAPPINESS

In the first novella, “Immaculate Man,” the unnamed narrator is having an affair with a Catholic priest who runs the shelter for battered women where she works. Father Clement was a 43-year-old virgin when she met him, pure of body but full of the desire to fall in love—famished, as she puts it, “for the inside of my body.”

What the narrator loves most about Clement is that purity. Hers is the only nude body he has ever seen or touched. He has never even seen pornography, so he has no silicone-perfected breasts to fantasize about, no flat bellies to compare with hers as he touches her stomach softened by childbearing—in short, nothing to reduce her in his estimation.

The tragedy is that this woman creates her own insecurity. Just because Clement doesn't find fault with her now, doesn't mean he won't. Even as they vacation together in Paris she is envisioning his flight, with the kind of odd detachment that seems to precede hysteria. She's sure she'll lose him to one of the battered women he counsels, a woman with “long pink nails,” more feminine in her victimization.

Clement is not faultless himself. Awkward and disapproving with her children, he's also subject to irrational fits of rage towards his dog. But she accepts him anyway, putting aside doubts about him in favor of doubts about herself. We're finally left thinking that not only can this great love not last, but that it shouldn't. It's simply not worth it. With all that doubt hanging around, how can this woman be even fleetingly happy?

LOVE ISN'T EQUAL

In “Living at Home,” we meet a 44-year-old woman who has been married three times, seemingly satisfactorily in each case. But she has now found her true love in Lauro, a famous Italian journalist who covers wars and uprisings in the world's most dangerous trouble spots—yet who fears death in the dentist's chair during a simple extraction.

She hates him a little for this softness, especially in the face of her very real fears during his frequent absences, absences which leave her hoarding his pillow case and dirty shirts to hold onto his precious scent: “He would never do the same for me,” she says.

The idea of maintaining a safe emotional distance from Lauro is intriguing, though she recognizes the impossibility. In her frustration, she writes him angry fantasies—which she never mails—about a woman who can remain unmoved by love for a man: “This is a powerful way to be: the unmoved mover,” she writes. “I imagine a woman who files her nails while a man caresses her breasts, who reads a magazine while his mouth is on her. Who cannot be made to pay attention.”

Again, it is a sad lesson. This experienced woman, who ought now to understand love a little, lives with the pained belief that she is not enough for this last Great Love. Gordon seems to be telling us love never gets to be equal between partners.

TOO LATE FOR HAPPINESS

Finally, in the title novella, we meet Paola, who does what the two women before her would never have done. She tells her lover just what a pompous, unlikable twit he is. Problem is, she ends up paying for it for the rest of her life. She is 78 now, returning to her native Italy from the United States, to where she was banished at the age of 15 for causing the suicide of her 16-year-old lover.

He was an overly romantic boy who fancied himself a great intellectual—and her an almost-suitable companion. Paola had agreed to die with him in a suicide pact, thinking it a passing whim, “like his other enthusiasms, learning Russian, or becoming a vegetarian.”

Yet in the ancient tower where he intends to carry out the pact, they quarrel. He questions her love, and for the first and certainly the last time, she returns his anger; she then flees, hearing the shot as she goes. For her justifiable anger Paola is punished by their families and lives the next 63 years in a “frozen life,” separated from her much-loved father. Only when she returns to Italy with her son does she finally confront the guilt that has immobilized her existence. By then it is too late for a happy life.

There is tragedy in all three novellas. And scattered almost casually throughout are the kinds of small truths that make you say, Yes, yes, she knows doesn't she? Reading Mary Gordon, who has written knowingly of women, religion and repression, there is that same sense of painful recognition often found—embarrassingly enough—listening to pop radio stations while breaking up with a lover. You hear your story told in pieces of every song.

In The Rest of Life, you find the soft parts of yourself that you fear most, on every page.