SOURCE: Hughes, Kathryn. “Great Divides.” New Statesman and Society 7, no. 287 (28 January 1994): 38-9.

In the following review of The Rest of Life, Hughes praises Gordon's prose for its high quality and precision.

Three rich, precise novellas make up Mary Gordon's The Rest of Life. Each one comprises a meditation by a woman, no longer young, on her relationship with a particular lover. In “Immaculate Man”, a middle-aged social worker recalls how her job as a carer and comforter of battered women has brought her to the extraordinary position of lover to a Catholic priest.

At the age of 43, Father Clement, welfare worker and member of the Paracletists, has never touched a woman. With wonderment, gratitude and resignation—for she knows that she must soon lose him to a tauter, flirtier woman—the narrator describes Clement's delighted exploration of her body. And while she initiates him into a world of...