Literature About Aging

I'm taking care of my 84-year-old mother now, and she's not in bad shape, but it's sure got me thinking about how hard it is getting old. Are there any good books that have inspiring or interesting old characters besides "The Old Man and the Sea"?
—K.C., Tucson, Ariz.
 
   Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley is the unapologetically proud and gruff heroine of Margaret Laurence's luminous 1964 novel, "The Stone Angel." Hagar is no nonagenarian Pollyanna—she feels the arthritis in her fingers, the swelling of her ankles, the incontinence of her tears. But she's anything but finished with life; indeed, she's indignant that people imagine "old ladies feeding like docile rabbits on the lettuce leaves of other times, other manners."

   The elderly once appeared in literature as venerable and wise. But from the early 19th to the mid-20th century, wrote David Hackett Fischer in "Growing Old in America," there was a dramatic decline in the literary status of old age. "When old age appears at all in a literary work, it is apt to be not tragic but pathetic," he wrote.


A novel so painful about the subject of aging parents that I read it with uncontrollable tears was "Dad" by William Wharton. An adult son watches his father fade from life: "There's no room for him in this world anymore. I know something about old age now. You're old when most people would rather have you dead."

John Updike and Philip Roth have fearlessly chronicled old age. David Lodge edged into that territory with his wonderful exploration of hearing loss in "Deaf Sentence." Jane Gardam's portraits of an aged couple, in "Old Filth" and "The Man in the Wooden Hat," are eccentric and funny. In Penelope Lively's "Moon Tiger," 76-year-old Claudia Hampton, lying in a hospital, describes herself as an "ungodly foulmouthed old woman," which makes her a highly entertaining narrator. Two fine memoirs of aging are Diana Athill's "Somewhere Towards the End" and Doris Grumbach's "Coming Into the End Zone."

I like to think the elderly can see the humor in their situation, as Angela Carter's aging heroines, former vaudeville singers, did in her novel "Wise Children." Preparing for a party, the two sisters "painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now."

" 'It's every woman's tragedy,' said Nora as we contemplated our painted masterpieces, 'that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.' "


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W2