SOURCE: Kemp, Peter. “What's the Damage?” Sunday Times (16 January 1994): section 6, p. 13.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Kemp addresses the subjects of life's instabilities and “the hazards of human existence.”

A surprising feature of The Rest Of Life is how cheery its author looks in the photograph on the dustjacket. For the world encountered in her pages is far from comforting. Life's ability to deal out harm is unsparingly chronicled. Nothing sustaining, it's stressed, is likely to last for long. On to all the close relationships and domestic circumstances that Mary Gordon portrays could be pinned a warning phrase she once used as the title for a collection of short stories: Temporary Shelter.

Institutional refuges—a hostel for battered wives, a centre for autistic youngsters, a rehabilitation ward—loom in the backgrounds of the three novellas that make up this book. In the foreground are...