SOURCE: Weinman, Irving. “Three Faces of Singular Love.” Times (London) (27 January 1994): 36.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Weinman applauds the depth and compassion of Gordon's stories.

The novella, fiction's halfway house, needs the short story's focus and the novel's depth. In each of the three novellas comprising The Rest of Life, Mary Gordon's focus is a single character. Her depth comes from writing out of the high heart of compassion that never falls into sentimentality.

In the title novella, old Paola returns to Italy with her American son. Her life has been dedicated to forgetting. She survived a teenage suicide pact. Her boyfriend's death and the love affair it revealed had shamed her family into banishing her to America. Now, returning to Turino, she relives the old guilts and self-disgust, made poignant by love. The remembered love scenes are very simple and completely beautiful. In...