SOURCE: Wilhelmus, Tom. “Contingency.” Hudson Review 47, no. 1 (spring 1994): 133-40.

In the following review of works by various writers, Wilhelmus praises the stories in Gordon's The Rest of Life for addressing the complications of life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Last year in The Volcanic Lover, Susan Sontag described history as a kind of flea market where the leftovers of the past become found objects for a person collecting materials for her own creation. The items she inherits from the past are random and include not only objects but also ideas, artifacts, and codes. What she does with them is equally the product of accident and the consequences of her own immediate need.

Today, “contingency,” the buzz word for this view of history, is at the heart of some of our most considered explanations about why things are as they are and how they got that way. “The line...