[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Teleky praises Gordon as the foremost American Catholic writer of her generation and “one of the finest writers of our time.”]

In her latest book, a collection of three novellas called The Rest Of Life, American writer Mary Gordon continues the intense exploration of the sexual and spiritual relations between men and women that marked her extraordinary first novel, Final Payments. While The Rest Of Life places religion further in the background, spiritual matters still shape the book.

In the opening novella, “Immaculate Man,” an unnamed middle-aged narrator examines her love affair with a priest, and the future she sees for them. Father Clement, a 43-year-old virgin, has no idea what to expect of the sexuality he is suddenly discovering, while Gordon's divorced protagonist is all too clear about the limitations of the flesh. “Living At Home” presents another middle-aged woman narrator—albeit this time a sophisticated doctor who works with autistic patients. She speaks of her lover of five years, an Italian war journalist named Lauro (echoing Petrarch's Laura) and she, too, is besotted. Gordon refuses to cut her plots to the current fashion. Instead, she takes as subject the obsessive nature of sexual love—generally associated with male writers—and offers female protagonists who can be as idiotically desperate as any man.

The chaotic force of such desire is seldom pretty to watch. Gordon's women veer between yearning, self-loathing, self-effacement and fear, even appearing ridiculous to themselves. They may define themselves through their bodies, but they never live far from the spirit. Gordon is, after all, the pre-eminent American Catholic—or, more accurately, lapsed Catholic—writer of her generation. The dark night of the soul is never far from her mind.

A bleaker version of romantic love occurs in the book's final novella, “The Rest Of Life.” Here, Gordon recounts the history of an elderly Italian woman who, after spending her life in the United States, returns for the first time to Turin. At 15, Paola had made a suicide pact with a schoolmate-lover, Leo, a troubled poet devoted to Romantic literature and nationalist politics. But in the last minute she refused to join him in death. Shamed, even attacked for betraying him, she emigrated to New York, where she married a decent man and knew gratitude, not passion. Yet, Paola refuses to romanticize Leo—she can barely remember his face—and her attempt to understand the meaning of the past leaves her desolate.

Finally, Paola decides to tell her favorite son the story of her life: “All the stories. All the different ways it could have happened, each of them true.” Loss, regret and forgiveness mingle in her vision of the gulf between people. We can offer each other only our stories, yet this takes courage, and matters. In Paola's discovery, Gordon affirms the value of the storyteller's art. And in The Rest Of Life she again proves herself to be one of the finest writers of our time.