Boomer Tales

If the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-1964) is not a demographic that interests you, feel free to skip to another post. But if you want to dive deep into the emotional territory of aging, here are some tales for you. Remember, we all become elderly eventually!

First up, a new review of a recent book by a seasoned and reliable author.

Baumgartner     Paul Auster     (2023)  The title character of this short novel is a seventy-something philosophy professor who, at the beginning of the book, is just about to retire from teaching at Princeton. Baumgartner’s wife has been dead for a decade, but he revisits his life with her through dreams, reminiscences, and perusal of the journals and poems that she left behind. Sensing the precarity of old age, he seeks to make the most of his time, continuing to write scholarly books and pursuing various romantic relationships. At the risk of revealing a spoiler, I’ll tell you that that ending is disturbing and not at all what you might expect. (For a review of another Auster novel, 4321, click here.)

Next, recaps of a few of my many reviews over the past seven years that feature elderly characters.

Our Souls at Night     Kent Haruf     (2015)  A widow and a widower, neighbors in a small Midwestern town, carve out their own version of happiness in spite of setbacks. Readers can tuck this story away as a tutorial in how to cope with the inevitability of mortality. (The 2017 movie of the same name starred Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.) Click here for my full review.

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)  In thirteen linked short stories, the incomparable author Strout revisits Olive Kittredge, a character from her previous fiction. Olive, still living in rural Maine, is retired and declining in health, but she connects with other quirky characters as she fearlessly faces her future. Click here for my full review.

Midwinter Break     Bernard MacLaverty     (2017)  A couple in their seventies who live in Scotland take a short vacation to Amsterdam in this masterful study of the pleasures and trials of a very long marriage. Click here for my full review.

Henry, Himself     Stewart O’Nan     (2019)  This is a quiet, introspective portrait of a year in the life of Henry Maxwell, a retired engineer who lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Emily. The novelist is able to turn everyday events into drama that drives his narrative in a highly effective way. Click here for my full review.

The Sense of an Ending     Julian Barnes     (2011)  Tony Webster, a retired Briton who is amicably divorced, receives an unusual legacy that brings to mind painful scenes from his time in secondary school and at university. This ruminative short novel about memory, regret, forgiveness, and revenge was made into a movie in 2017.

Violeta     Isabel Allende     (2022)  Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. The fictional Violeta Del Valle tells her captivating life story in first person, from her birth in 1920 during one pandemic to her death in 2020 during another pandemic. The backdrop is the political upheaval in the history of an unnamed South American country that is very much like Chile.

Short Stories

When you’ve had a long day but want a mental getaway before your head hits the pillow, consider turning to a collection of short stories for a quick dose of fiction.

• First, two books of regular short stories:

Blank Pages and Other Stories     Bernard MacLaverty     (2021)  MacLaverty now lives in Scotland, but he grew up in Northern Ireland, and his fictional characters live on both sides of the Irish Sea. As I’ve noted in my review of his novel Midwinter Break, he focuses on the intricacies of ordinary domestic life, among people of the middle class or lower middle class. Some of these stories are set in the present day, and some reach back into the 20th century. There are no wild rides here, but there are plenty of introspective observations, in spare and lovely prose.

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  These ten stories reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story delves into a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the stories are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life. (For a Sittenfeld novel, see my review of Rodham.)

• Next, some short stories that are put together as a novel:

The Seamstress of Sardinia     Bianca Pitzorno     Translated from the Italian by Brigid Maher     (2022)  Although this book was published as a novel, it’s more a series of interlinked short stories about a young woman who lived at the beginning of the 20th century on an island off the coast of Italy. Pitzorno evokes Old World charm while detailing the extreme social and financial stratification that the unnamed seamstress faces as she hand-crafts clothing and household linens for her wealthy clients. The female supporting characters are mostly competent and feisty; the male characters are mostly corrupt and lecherous. The seamstress is advised by one woman, “Don’t ever let any man be disrespectful to you.” (138)

• Finally, short stories that are sort of essays, too:

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership     Wendell Berry     (2022)  This book is the 14th in a series of novels and short-story collections that celebrate rural life in the American South. In this collection, Berry further fills in the cast of characters from his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and environs. Central to the stories is Andy Catlett, who, like Berry himself, was born in 1932. The narratives cross the border to essay form, and often to threnody, as Berry laments the industrialization that has nearly obliterated the old agrarian ways. I had not read any of the previous Port William books, but I easily picked up the threads, and I treasured Berry’s majestic and evocative prose, which is also in evidence in his acclaimed nonfiction on environmental issues.