Mary Gordon Critical Essay | Critical Review by Ellen Akins

Critical Review by Ellen Akins

SOURCE: Akins, Ellen. “Worlds of Possibility.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (29 August 1993): 2, 9.

In the following review, Akins praises The Rest of Life as a volume of fine novellas, written in well-crafted prose.

“All this” is how a woman in “The Rest of Life” refers to what she's telling us, then adds, “By ‘all this’ I guess I mean how I have shaped my life.” And this is very much what these three fine novellas [in The Rest of Life] are about: the shape of life, the place of a person in it, the continuity of a body and mind in time. Not stories in the traditional sense, they take the form of extended meditations. The first two, written in the first person, read like the journal entries of an ideal diarist, one who can count candor, insight, acute powers of observation and literary grace among her...
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