SOURCE: Rodd, Candice. “Pandemonium and the Healing Power of Love.” Independent (London) (6 February 1994): 42.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Rodd praises the three novellas for their integrity, rich language, and authentic characterization.

In one of these three superb novellas [in The Rest of Life], an eager Catholic priest tries to tell the non-believing narrator about Christ's Ascension. He plunges in breathlessly, stumbles, gets events hopelessly out of sequence, but “the badness of the storytelling left spaces you could fill in so in the end you saw more, understood more, than you would have from somebody who'd told it well”. Filling in the spaces is what Mary Gordon does so remarkably. The details of her characters' lives come piecemeal, vivid and disorderly as memory; but it is the connecting monologues, where the protagonists muse cautiously on the mysteries of love, guilt, parenthood, death and hope, that...