SOURCE: Messud, Claire. “Traveling Hopefully.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4740 (4 February 1994): 21.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Messud describes the stories as both serious and accessible, and asserts that the title novella is the most moving in the volume.

Mary Gordon's is not a showy talent, but it is no less powerful for that. The author of Final Payments, The Company of Women and The Other Side has, in these works, addressed the endlessly absorbing questions of faith, of family relationships and of gender dynamics—in short, the more serious stuff of life. In her new book [The Rest of Life,] a collection of three crisp, ostensibly unrelated novellas, Gordon again turns her compassionate eye on the dilemmas of existence: what could be said to link these disparate narratives is the overriding question of what makes us who we are, at any given stage, and they...