SOURCE: Higgins, Michael. “Are Religious Writers, Artists Handicapped by Faith?” Toronto Star (18 September 1993): F17.

In the following essay, Higgins discusses the theme of Catholicism in the novellas of The Rest of Life.

Although my wife plays Mozart with considerable grace, she prefers Chopin, Debussy and Kunz. As a consequence, in order to get my Mozart fix, I spend a few days at New York's annual Lincoln Centre Mostly Mozart Festival. It may not be the Beatific Vision but it comes awfully close.

One of the additional pleasures of being in the Big Apple is the simple, although often expensive, exercise of book browsing. I picked up my usual bundle of arcane and obscure trophies and was satisfied that my plunder was a modest one when the contemporary reared its head with the publication of a new work by novelist Mary Gordon.

Not only that, but the papers were...