[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Knapp praises the stories as powerful narratives exploring each heroine's existential aloneness.]

Mary Gordon's books are like favorite desserts—long awaited, they are gone too soon, no matter how well savored. Her works to date, which include short stories, essays, and novels, are now joined by The Rest of Life, her seventh volume. It is made up of three novellas.

United by their female perspective, the novellas each explore a different narrator's consciousness as captured in a complex web of lovers, husbands, and children. “Immaculate Man,” narrated by a woman whose much-younger lover is a Catholic priest, treats a plot with plenty of tabloid potential, given the recent number of popularized scandals involving Catholic priests worldwide. Still, (not surprisingly for this author), nothing “happens” here. The text consists of introversive ponderings on how the two lovers met, the painful quandary of Clement's broken celibacy vows, and his relationship with the older homosexual priest Boniface. The narrator appears to be as much Clement's mother as his lover—protective, adoring, yet resigned to the fact that he will eventually leave her for someone younger, since his relationship to her is of body more than spirit, sex more than love.

“Living at Home” is told by a psychiatrist who works with autistic children and moves from marriage to marriage as she tires of the houses in which she and her husbands reside. Framed by the story of the marriages, it is also a philosophical piece on the significance of human relationships with material things: “To live a continuous life a person needs to be in relation to the world of objects.” To abandon that relatedness is to risk exile into uncharted, terrifying regions—the autism of the narrator's patients, or her mother's decline into senility. Sensitively, passionately, Gordon explores the tenuous thread that connects human consciousness to the world of “acceptable” behavior.

The final piece, built around an incident from the biography of Cesare Pavese, is also the book's most striking. The story plays out the process of transgression and atonement in a woman who flees Italy in disgrace at age fifteen and lives for sixty-three years in exile, broken by guilt and self-hatred. Now old, she returns to Italy with her son and must relive the events that led up to her lover's tragic death decades before. Gordon's text is movingly, almost wrenchingly written, as this narrator finds her way, at last, into a dialogue with the dead, who, “being one and many, knew there was nothing to forgive.” At her journey's end, she is finally free to live “the rest of life.”

Mary Gordon's heroines, despite their radical departure from many traditional female roles, are essentially conservative and traditional. They are strongest in their roles as mothers, all of them nurturing their children, their patients, and their lovers with infinite motherly patience. Ultimately, they fail in the search for connectedness to their partners and seem, even in the midst of a “relationship,” perennially aware of their existential aloneness. In Gordon's nuanced, insightful presentation of this aloneness, there are no easy answers, no feminist solutions, no Catholic solutions: perhaps this is why her books are so powerful, and continue to be in the “not to be missed” category for many readers.