Synopsis
An esteemed memoirist examines aging with the grace of Elegy for Iris and the wry irreverence of I Feel Bad About My Neck.
The Barnes & Noble Review
The old write to us from the past in language that seems to be clearer, less cluttered than our own. Think of V. S. Pritchett or Penelope Fitzgerald in their 80s, Patrick Leigh Fermor or P. G. Wodehouse nearing their 90s, all models still of accuracy and economy on the page. We should credit not their years, perhaps, but their time. Such writers inhabited a pre-electronic era when words were carefully expended and sentences retained a classical elegance. The opening of Wodehouse's 1935 novel The Luck of the Bodkins is a famous example: "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."