[In the following review of The Rest of Life, Bush describes the collection's three novellas as striking narratives about self-assertive women.]

“We don't know much yet about how women might really be, if they felt they could be however they liked,” muses the narrator of “Living at Home,” one of three novellas that make up Mary Gordon's book [The Rest of Life]. Though the central characters in this story and in “Immaculate Man” seem to live as they like, they nevertheless feel constrained, defined by their ties to children, parents and lovers, by the work they have chosen to do and by cultural expectations. Paola, the 78-year-old central character of the final story, “The Rest of Life,” lives the most traditional female life. It is she, interestingly, who finds the centeredness and sense of transcendence that eludes the nameless narrators of the other novellas.

Each woman in these striking stories has acted with an uncommon degree of self-assertion—the first in risking, at age 48, an affair with a priest; the second in casually leaving three husbands while remaining constant to her calling as a physician working with autistic children; the third in refusing to go through with the teenage suicide pact that ended her 16-year-old lover's life. All three suffer, to varying degrees, the guilt and shame that have followed such self-assertion.

The narrator of “Immaculate Man” is attracted by her lover's innocence, which she contrasts with her own cynicism. A priest who lived a secluded life until he met her when he was 44, Clement has retained a trust in people and God that draws her even while it exasperates her. She fears that their relationship will corrupt him and that, despite her love, she may be using him. A divorced woman whose husband left her, she has felt that no one would ever again see her as attractive or desirable. Now she fears that her lover may soon notice how far her body falls short of media images of desirable women, and that he will leave her for a younger, more attractive woman. Guilt and fear accompany her love.

Shame is the dominant theme of “The Rest of Life.” Paola has spent her life in the physical and emotional exile that followed her refusal to die for love when she was 15. The way those around her, especially her beloved father, reacted taught her that “shame is stronger than love.” And yet she realizes that it did not have to be this way. If her father had been a stronger, less conventional man, she thinks, “he could have stood beside me at the door, encircled his shamed daughter … My father could have taken my shame, filtered it into another substance. Sadness, perhaps. Regret … There could have been no more shame. Shame is a sin of the eye.”

Like the women in the other stories, the narrator of “Living at Home” is intensely aware of life's perilousness. Both the autistic children she treats and her elderly mother's decline convince her of “the extreme difficulty in managing the details of an orderly life.” Much of her narrative is a meditation on our relationship to objects and places, to the possessions and homes that can hold either too much meaning for us or too little. She has left her husbands, she feels, simply because she “got so tired of the places where we lived together.” Though she believes that dissolving her marriages has not permanently harmed either her former husbands or her sons, she feels uneasy about the disorder of her life. She feels she must try to explain and justify herself.

Gordon's Roman Catholic background is evident in the role that faith—or its absence—plays in her characters' lives. The narrator of “Immaculate Man” is a lapsed Protestant who struggles to understand how her lover's religious tradition has shaped him. The decline of his religious order, the Paracletists, cast him adrift and thus prepared the way for their affair. She mourns what she sees as the end of a “clean, weightless world, where … men wait and pray and look up at the clouds and then are spoken to by angels.” Her lover has lost too much, she thinks, by losing the Catholicism of his youth. She contrasts his belief in an eternal life of rest in the perpetual light of God's presence with her own image of life after death as “spinning and spinning through millions of light years of emptiness, the others I have loved spinning millions of light years away in their own emptiness.” Her love for a priest and her efforts to understand him have brought her “back to life in faith. But not in God. … In appetite.” Gordon uses their affair to explore the strengths and deficiencies of innocence and experience, the circumstances that make faith so difficult, and the significance of being valued as a sexual being.

That the narrator of “Living at Home” is a German Jew plays a role in her ambivalent feelings about places and things. In part she is reacting to a mother who consoled herself for the loss of home and country by obsessively caring for the objects she had managed to salvage. The narrator, in contrast, lives in a stark modern apartment furnished with hard, neutral things. Here she feels at home, living with a foreign correspondent who has transmuted his own displacement into a fascination with the world's most troubled locations. The narrator, a woman extraordinarily aware of the threat of non-being and of the way that vitality can seep out of life, speculates that women performing household tasks may actually be “hiding their states of death absorption, death fear, death similitude.” Housekeeping may be a part of the “craftsmanship of the habitual” that pulls us back from sinking into nothingness. She herself relies, instead, on her sons and, to a greater extent, her lover to keep her connected to life. Desire is her source of vitality; she feels a “beguilement at realizing the extent to which our life in bed together is a simple fuel that causes the rest of our life to operate.”

Both “Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home” are stories of women at midlife, women who are painfully aware of death and of the gradual ebbing away of life and are finding a fearful rebirth in what they think will be their final and definitive loves. These women, living without the anchors of belief or tradition, long for a more abundant life. Afraid of sinking into a kind of death-in-life, they cling to eros. Gordon's women need men, need the endlessly renewed cycles of desire and satisfaction in order to feel fully alive. And they realize that this need is perilous—the men may leave; they may die.

“Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home” are stories about the attempt to find abundant life not in God but in sexual love. This story has often been told from a man's point of view, but seldom with such frankness from a woman's. Gordon's narrators speak to an unspecified “you,” a confessor to whom they reveal their deepest selves as they try to make sense of their lives. Consequently, we feel we know these women as we know few people either in life or in literature.

“The Rest of Life” is both more conventionally plotted and narrated and more derivative than the other stories. Echoes of James Joyce's “The Dead” and Leo Tolstoy's “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” are discernible, translated into a woman's voice and vision. Paola knows that she will soon die and that love is long over. Her unexpected return to the Italy she left 63 years earlier brings her to an epiphany that allows her to resolve her past and to live fully during the time that remains. She comes to see that she has paid too much in guilt and shame, and that her refusal to die, and her love for the simple sensations of life, have in themselves been a kind of triumph. Despite everything, “she has made something of herself: a quiet woman with a husband, children and a house, a garden. Something was salvaged of a life.” Though she does not have a conventional religious faith, and feels that the “God people pray to is an empty word, a husk, lighter than air,” her story ends with a prayer for all those who have died young and needlessly.

Like Joyce's Gabriel Conroy, Paola feels connected to all humanity—the living and the dead. This woman who has been so painfully silent throughout her life, who has never been able to tell anyone about her past, now feels “a suggestion of a face to whom she will tell her story. All the different stories. All the different ways it could have happened, each of them true.” Like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, her life's end is redeemed by a realization of life's meaning, and by an overwhelming sense of compassion and connectedness—and it is not too late.

There is much to admire in this book, but there are a few false notes. In Gordon's uncritical presentation of the power of sexual love to renew and fuel life, she comes close to sharing our culture's idolatry of sex. Do middle-aged women with teenaged children and demanding careers really find the time to spend so many afternoons making love? Is sex really such an inexhaustible appetite, especially as we grow older? Surely friendship and, yes, religion play a larger role in most lives than they do for Gordon's characters. The women in “Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home” can concentrate on love because other aspects of their lives run so smoothly. They are good at their secure, well-paying jobs. Their children give them few worries and demand little time. Only one aged parent becomes briefly a focus of concern. But this is far from the reality of life for most people.

Yet Gordon succeeds admirably in exploring a particular kind of modern sensibility—that of the intelligent, reflective woman at midlife who is trying to make sense of a world that is, for her, bereft of transcendent meaning. Though the women of the stories are quite different from one another, together the three novellas conduct an extended examination of the ways in which guilt, shame and fear may diminish life, of the ways in which we struggle to find vitality and meaning, and of the gifts life brings us, sometimes quite to our own surprise.