SOURCE: Bush, Trudy. “Midlife Desires: Seeking an Abundant Life.” Christian Century 110, no. 33 (17 November 1993): 1162-64.

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...