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"Old age isn't a battle. Old age is a massacre."
- Philip Roth



The older I get, the more tolerant I get of Roth's later novellas. I remember thinking when I read one ten plus years ago that they were simply indulgences. Roth throwing off and idea and turning it into a novella. Why couldn't he go back to writing his great novels. Now, as I read some of his last several novels these last several months. Older now. I think I might understand. They aren't as robust as his great novels of the 1990s. But they are still pretty fantastic. They are memoirs. They are ... reflections of life prior to death, life in anticipation of death, life contemplating death. They are the murmurs of a man standing on the edge of the abyss.

There were certain parts of this novel that seemed to touch aspects of my own life. I too had a brother who seemed to have perfect health. My older brother could fail to brush his teeth for a year and not get a cavity. He rarely had a headache, a fever, a cold. He was an Army Ranger and later a decorated helicopter pilot. I was the opposite. Flat feet, pigeon-toed, diabetic, rheumatic, thyroid issues, bad teeth, Marfan syndrome, heart issues, struggling with pain nearly every day of my life.

There seems to exists in brothers that share this weird imbalance a measured shadow. At one level there is care and concern and on another level an almost hero worship that easily slides (at times) into a jealousy and enviousness that makes one empathetic to Cain.

Anyway, this is a very human novel about loneliness, aging, relationships, memory and death. It isn't perfect and far from Roth's best, but it is still very good and FAR better than The Humbling.