The Years by Nicholas DelBanco

O.K., complaint number one is that this book was misrepresented to me as a nice book about old people going on cruises.

And there were a few pages about life on a cruise ship, probably just enough in the beginning to entice people to buy the book.  But the real message of the book was about the horror of memory loss as old age sets in.  It was also about the mental confusion that potentially leads one off on strange pathways when one is old, because the mind’s logic circuits have been compromised.

O.K., again.

Both my sister and I (60’s) read innumerable books about the process of dealing with aging parents (80’s); these were effectively self-help books.  And we read every one we could stomach.  Many did help. 

This was not a self-help book for the young-ens.  It was a baying at the moon from one of the young-ens, who loved his or her mother and family and wanted to rail against the injustice of facing the same fate.

Son or Daughter, it doesn’t matter, you spend the quality time at the end of life with a parent and scream at the unfairness of their loss of memory because you are next, and you know it. 

O.K., yet again, I sympathize with their loss.  But writing as the God-like omniscient narrator for the first 200+ pages of a 300 page book is inexcusable.  I hate O.N. because:

      Whatever the writer says is unassailably true, even if the author is lying or ignorant.

      O.N., but nonetheless single-sourced; no dialog second-source confirmation.

      It’s too easy – it’s the lazy writer’s mode.  You should work for it through dialogue.

I hate to bring in the name-dropping.  The fact that in this “kind of book”, all the women graduated from Radcliff and the men from Harvard.  They all summered in … .. and wintered in … ..  It used to be called old money and had sex appeal in women’s magazines, 50 years ago.  It was pretentious in this book: “bad champagne in business class”, Kubrick and Garbo.  It’s back to the Garrison Keilor quotation, “All the women are strong; the men good looking, and all the children are above average.”

There’re 24 million people over 65 and more than half of them are women.  This crass book will appeal to them.  It mentions the names they grew up with, signifying wealth, position and status.  If ten percent of these dowagers buy the book, that’s a million copies.  These millions also have really great moms who are dying in their nineties.  Women whose marriages lasted 50-70 years, who went through seriously trying times: world wars and depressions, and yet held their families together.