Age
A Love Story
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A novel that examines aging and marriage with sincerity and insight
Rupert and Gemma, an elderly couple still very much in love, know that death will inevitably come for one of them before taking the other, so they keep private journals to ensure that the survivor's mate will never truly be gone, living on instead through his or her words. Age is the narrative of Rupert and Gemma's lives: their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which the two are irreversibly entwined. Each writes of life's mundane events—social outings, errands, a quiet night at home—that assume wistful meaning when viewed through the lens of memory.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The animating idea behind Calisher's slender new novelan elderly couple's coming to terms with the inevitability of their deathis a worthy theme. And the fictional materials meant to give it substance here seem promising, even exotic. Gemma is a retired architect in her late 70s, Rupert an inactive poet four years younger. One of her daughters by a previous marriage is sordidly murdered in a back alley; the other, conventionally married and pregnant, is living in Saudi Arabia. Rupert's ex-wife arrives from England only to die as they look on; their old friends, a literary power-broker and biographer and his wife, make a brief appearance and depart by double suicide. But the working-through of the material in the form of a team diary is curiously inert and fragmentary, much of it in language that is quaint to the point of eccentricity. A murderno small thing, after allis merely alluded to in passing, as is the adolescent girl's attempted seduction of her stepfather. The death in their presence of a significant person is merely flatly reported, news of the double suicide arrives in the form of a New York Times obituary. The narrative remains lifeless, an exercise rather than a cogent work of art.
