SOURCE: Caldwell, Gail. “Voice, Insight, Memory: Three Finely Wrought Novellas by Mary Gordon.” Boston Globe (8 August 1993): B12.

In the following review, Caldwell praises The Rest of Life, observing that the three novellas express a strong sense of voice, insight, and memory.

In the realm of intention, as any behaviorist will tell you, there's a world of difference between a wink and a twitch. Charting that vast landscape of meaning is what ethnography is all about, and what anthropologists call “thick description”—an elaborate assessment of ritual, motive and emotion. Writers of fiction, if the least bit contemplative, practice this trick of perception without a second thought; they know that behind the subtlest of gestures lie fields of intrigue. But thick description seems to me the very essence of Mary Gordon's fiction. She imposes layer upon layer of emotional fabric onto her characters, until they seem both utterly familiar...