Symposium: Popular Literature on Aging

Abstract

As a child, I often was caught reading under the bed covers with a flashlight. My appreciation for elegantly crafted writing and a good story well told has never diminished. Although my habit of reading late into the night continues, these days I am dismayed by the preponderance of academic reading in the stacks beside my bed and the dwindling amount of fiction I read. Quite frankly, I hope this review symposium will incite in all of us a modest scholarly rebellion to create room for literary reading in our private and professional lives. My argument is simple—reading books that engage our emotions and our imaginations can enhance the quality of our personal lives, improve our teaching, and inspire our research. This review brings to your attention current and/or award-winning novels that offer aging perspectives, and we hope you will consider their value for learning about aging. The invited reviewers include several well-regarded gerontologists with humanistic leanings, a cultural critic focusing on aging in comparative literature, and a geriatrician who writes an acclaimed blog on aging and health. Interestingly, given the feminization of aging, the central character in each of the books selected is a man. Gilead, however, is written by a woman, and three of the reviewers are women, so perhaps the gender mix in this symposium is more equal in that way. The life review process, theorized as normative by Butler (1963) some 40 years ago, and the issues of ego integrity in the work of Erik Erikson, is a key theme in four of the books. The critical nature of summing up the quality and consistency of the totality of one’s life is a risky endeavor as we see in Everyman and also in The Sense of an Ending. In Gilead and Simon’s Night, the review process and construction of self and meaning result in a sense of coherence and continuity and some resolution to conflicts and regrets. In contrast, the Hundred-Year-Old Man has no time for review—he is too busy dealing with the present.

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