Three powerful novellas tell of women who experience impassioned and transfiguring love affairs.
From Kirkus Reviews
Convoluted meditations by women on love and displacement--in Gordon's first fiction since The Other Side (1989). In ``Immaculate Man,'' the best of the three novellas here, a divorced middle-aged New York social-worker is pondering her love affair with a Catholic priest, Father Clement, hitherto a 43-year- old virgin. What Clement has done for this agnostic woman, fast losing her attractiveness, is revive her faith in ``appetite''; what she has done for him is less positive: ``I think that being my lover has displaced him.'' At the least, she has caused this guileless man to dissemble. Is she simply a bridge to other relationships that will further taint his spirituality? The middle- aged protagonists of ``Living at Home'' court displacement. Lauro is Italian, a death-defying journalist who covers revolutions; his thrice-married lover is the English daughter of German Jews, a doctor working with autistic children (who represent the terror of total displacement). The two live together in London when Lauro is not traveling; the arrangement (``mated but, in the way of our age, partial'') works, for their relationship is rooted in ``satisfied desire.'' It is Paola Smaldone, in the title piece, who has experienced the most extreme displacement. A native of Turin, Italy, she agreed in 1927 to a suicide pact with her profoundly unhappy and romantic teenage lover. Leo shot himself; Paola balked. Her adoring father, overwhelmed with shame, sent her to America. Now, 63 years later, she is back visiting with her son and his girlfriend, seeking the ``line running through her body like a wick'' that will connect the passionate girl to the anesthetized adult who has sleepwalked through ``the rest of life.'' These novellas grow through the slow accretion of thoughts and images rather than plot and dialogue; this makes them hard going, Gordon's elegant language notwithstanding. In their rarefied atmosphere, her lovers' passion is a pale fire and, finally, unconvincing.
my notes:
The Rest of Life by Mary Gordon. This book is three novellas about three women each of whom tells the story of the lover who most altered her life. Gordon is a very introspective, insightful writer. However, she has chosen 3 of the most whining, neurotic, self-absorbed women, through whom to explore and express her thoughts, that I have ever encountered in a book. I would not last through lunch with any of the three.
From Kirkus Reviews
Convoluted meditations by women on love and displacement--in Gordon's first fiction since The Other Side (1989). In ``Immaculate Man,'' the best of the three novellas here, a divorced middle-aged New York social-worker is pondering her love affair with a Catholic priest, Father Clement, hitherto a 43-year- old virgin. What Clement has done for this agnostic woman, fast losing her attractiveness, is revive her faith in ``appetite''; what she has done for him is less positive: ``I think that being my lover has displaced him.'' At the least, she has caused this guileless man to dissemble. Is she simply a bridge to other relationships that will further taint his spirituality? The middle- aged protagonists of ``Living at Home'' court displacement. Lauro is Italian, a death-defying journalist who covers revolutions; his thrice-married lover is the English daughter of German Jews, a doctor working with autistic children (who represent the terror of total displacement). The two live together in London when Lauro is not traveling; the arrangement (``mated but, in the way of our age, partial'') works, for their relationship is rooted in ``satisfied desire.'' It is Paola Smaldone, in the title piece, who has experienced the most extreme displacement. A native of Turin, Italy, she agreed in 1927 to a suicide pact with her profoundly unhappy and romantic teenage lover. Leo shot himself; Paola balked. Her adoring father, overwhelmed with shame, sent her to America. Now, 63 years later, she is back visiting with her son and his girlfriend, seeking the ``line running through her body like a wick'' that will connect the passionate girl to the anesthetized adult who has sleepwalked through ``the rest of life.'' These novellas grow through the slow accretion of thoughts and images rather than plot and dialogue; this makes them hard going, Gordon's elegant language notwithstanding. In their rarefied atmosphere, her lovers' passion is a pale fire and, finally, unconvincing.
my notes:
The Rest of Life by Mary Gordon. This book is three novellas about three women each of whom tells the story of the lover who most altered her life. Gordon is a very introspective, insightful writer. However, she has chosen 3 of the most whining, neurotic, self-absorbed women, through whom to explore and express her thoughts, that I have ever encountered in a book. I would not last through lunch with any of the three.
