Never Too Late for Love

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY DEC 4, 1995

In these 15 stories (six of which are reprinted from The Sunset Gang), the author of The War of the Roses portrays love and sex in a Florida Jewish retirement community. Unfortunately, they deal in stereotype and cliche, which means the women are yentas and the men long-suffering. In the title story, a man and woman who are married-but not to each other-meet at the Sunset Village Yiddish Club and fall in love, to the horror of both their families. Murray Gold learns that "A Widow Is a Very Dangerous Commodity" when his wife dies and friends as well as strangers begin putting themselves out for him in what Gold (rather dimly) doesn't recognize as attempted seduction. A woman who continues to think of her now-deceased husband as "Poor Herman" because "Their marriage bed had been as cold as ice" reunites with the one man who ever gave her pleasure, her teenage lover, and finds that he still does. In the bizarre "Tell Me That I'm Young," a 23-year-old man inherits his parents' condominium in Sunset Village and moves there with his young wife, who, in a fit of pique, takes to turning the head of an annoying older woman's husband. When a man sees mortality approaching, he tries "Tying Up Loose Ends" by confessing his many infidelities to his wife, who listens dispassionately. Although Adler purports to present a fresh view of the elderly, he serves up the same tired characters, only horny.