[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Kemp addresses the subjects of life's instabilities and “the hazards of human existence.”]

A surprising feature of The Rest Of Life is how cheery its author looks in the photograph on the dustjacket. For the world encountered in her pages is far from comforting. Life's ability to deal out harm is unsparingly chronicled. Nothing sustaining, it's stressed, is likely to last for long. On to all the close relationships and domestic circumstances that Mary Gordon portrays could be pinned a warning phrase she once used as the title for a collection of short stories: Temporary Shelter.

Institutional refuges—a hostel for battered wives, a centre for autistic youngsters, a rehabilitation ward—loom in the backgrounds of the three novellas that make up this book. In the foreground are love affairs overhung with an atmosphere of precariousness and impermanence. Once again, Gordon's characters include a sizeable proportion of refugees and the damaged. People are seen as inescapably under siege from accident, ageing and disease. Vulnerability is highlighted as the essence of human existence. Characters who are getting along without too much difficulty for the time being almost superstitiously congratulate themselves on the good luck they are, transiently, enjoying.

In keeping with Gordon's never-lapsing consciousness of peril (the emotional, physical and mental catastrophes that can smash into the little havens people have staked out for themselves), each of the three women this book focuses on takes a job attempting to rectify or restrict life's harmfulness. The narrator of the first novella is a social worker helping abused wives; the second story is told by a psychiatric doctor specialising in the care of autistic children: the elderly woman at the centre of the third has been a nurse in a physiotherapy unit for injured soldiers. With their pathological guardedness and bizarre clenched routines—one won't speak unless cocooned inside a construction of cardboard, wires and tins; another can't sleep unless in a “house” made from newspapers and boxes—the autistic children in the story “Living At Home” appear as merely extreme cases of patterns of behaviour Gordon detects everywhere.

Several times, the instability of even the most assured-looking ways of living is emphasised. A martinet who puts her faith in strict rationality and control is glimpsed, years after her retirement, deranged and raving in a hospital bed. Aghast, a daughter watches her mother's well-regulated, cultured existence disintegrate into the squalors of senile dementia. The ills of old age are bleakly dotted across these stories.

Like many Gordon protagonists, the women who tell their stories in the first two novellas—“Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home”—are well into middle life: not yet sufficiently advanced into old age as to be subject to its afflictions, but sufficiently far from youth to be apprehensive of what is approaching. Behind both is a scatter of broken relationships. The love affair in which each is, for now, happily involved seems a prodigy of unlikelihood.

The late-fortyish social worker in New York state, who recounts “Immaculate Man,” is the secret lover of a Catholic priest who has spent 20 years as a celibate in a monastery. The psychiatrist in “Living At Home” shares her London flat intermittently with a restless Italian foreign correspondent, continually drawn to danger zones abroad.

How these relationships are established and now sustain themselves is recorded with all the powers of observation and empathy Mary Gordon has finely honed through three novels and an earlier collection of short stories. As in those books, psychological depth impressively combines with sociological breadth.

The concluding story in The Rest Of Life—the one that gives the book its title—ranges particularly widely. From present-day America, it harks back to the Italy of the 1920s, where Paola, the daughter of a cultivated high-bourgeois home, fell in love as a girl of 15 with a youth morbidly enamoured of romantic deathliness. Cajoled into a suicide pact, she recoiled at the last minute, leaving her adolescent lover to shoot himself alone. From the “sixty-three years of frozen life” that ensued—decades petrified with shame, guilt and shock—she awakes only when she at last returns to her native Turin.

All three novellas in The Rest Of Life glint with brief flashes of wintry wit. Here and there, life's satisfactions glow like fires that won't take long to fade. But it's in their exact, unwavering delineation of the hazards of human existence that the distinction of these stories resides. Fastidiously unflinching, they are at once acute exercises in, and studies of, watchfulness.