SOURCE: Breslin, John B. “Between a Romp and Redemption.” Commonweal 121, no. 4 (25 February 1994): 24-5.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Breslin comments on the volume's confessional narrative voice and focus on themes of obsession and memory.

Three stories; three women; four men (one a father) to whom the women are bound by ties of obsession and memory; several children to whom the women are devoted, all but one boys, none fathered by their lovers. Such is the cast of characters in these novellas [in The Rest of Life], Mary Gordon's first fiction since the generational saga of The Other Side, but what really matters here are the voices, in turn confessional, suspicious, celebratory, always questioning but finally, in the concluding story, grateful.

The first two stories, “Immaculate Man” and “Living at Home,” echo one another most closely. Both are first-person narratives by women in their forties...