Getting old is no picnic — although as the aphorism reminds us, it’s better than the alternative.
Perhaps, but just barely. Aging turns hair gray, limbs rickety, minds mushy. Even Shakespeare seemed a bit impatient with that grumpy gus known as King Lear, that doddering fussbudget who spends a great deal of time complaining that his kids don’t call, don’t write, don’t bring the grandkids around to visit on Sundays.
Stewart O’Nan is the latest novelist to try his hand at depicting an old person’s narrowing world. In “Emily, Alone” (Viking), a sequel of sorts to his 2002 novel “Wish You Were Here,” he follows the waning days of Emily Maxwell, an elderly widow who now shares her Pittsburgh home with only her dog, Rufus.
Weeks pass. Seasons change. Emily nurses a friend through an illness, empties trash cans, replaces boxes of Kleenex, buys a new car. She seems nice enough — but is “nice” enough to sustain interest through a 255-page novel?
No, it isn’t. And the trouble — trouble for O’Nan, that is, not for readers, who can bask in the bounty — is that there are already a number of extraordinarily good stories about run-of-the-mill older people. They make “Emily, Alone” seem, by contrast, superficial and inert. British writer Anita Brookner and Irish writer William Trevor have written moving, luminous works that feature older characters whose commonplace lives still are marked by epiphanies, by changes external and internal. “All Passion Spent” (1931) by Vita Sackville-West is a study in maintaining one’s dignity in one’s twilight years, even as the whole world seems bent on dismantling it. In “Lolly Willowes” (1926), Sylvia Townsend Warner archly depicts the condescension with which younger people — even well-meaning ones — are apt to treat their elderly relatives, and demonstrates a devilishly clever way for old folks to maintain their independence.
Another superb novel with an older protagonist is “Starting Out in the Evening” (1998) by Brian Morton, a lovely tale that reminds us that romantic attraction can beguile those of any age. And Katherine Anne Porter’s 1930 short story “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” an American classic, still resonates.
The gold standard of stories about women who have reached old age is “The Stone Diaries” (1994) by Carol Shields. Born in Oak Park, Shields spent her adult years in Canada. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a woman’s journey through life, however, transcends place. “The moment of death occurs while we’re still alive,” a character muses. “Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. … A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.”
O’Nan is no Shields. He presents blank surfaces, hoping we will intuit how much brims below. In several of his novels, most especially “Last Night at the Lobster” (2007), this works fine; in the deadpan description of a chain restaurant’s clumsy closing hours, readers can infer the interesting mess that lurks below daily life. Less truly is more.
In “Emily, Alone,” though, that featureless first layer seems lazy, not strategic. The writing is a blur of blandness: “How powerful the romance of the past was, and how sad, all the lost possibilities, despite how well things had turned out.”
Compare that with the radiance of the anguished — and exhilarating — realization that comes to Daisy Stone Goodwill Flett in “The Stone Diaries”: “All she’s trying to do is keep things straight in her head. To keep the weight of her memories evenly distributed. To hold the chapters of her life in order. She feels a new tenderness growing for certain moments; they’re like beads on a string, and the string is wearing out. … And the question arises: what is the story of a life? … She needs a quiet place in which to think about this immensity.”
O’Nan’s novel is moribund, but Shields’ novel is alive with wit and perversity. It is proof of yet another aphorism about aging, one that shows up in “Dirt Music” (2001), a novel by the great Australian author Tim Winton: “We all die. But you might as well die with music.”
More Top Picks Best Fireproof Document Bags For Home