Norton):Īccording to the tradition established by Socrates and Plato, the old are viewed as wise and philosophical. Why are these particular kinds of stories about later-life loves significant and necessary? As Susan Gubar says in her 2018 memoir, Late-life Love (W.W. Some examples: Elizabeth Strout‘s Olive Kitteridge (Random House, 2008), Kent Haruf‘s Our Souls at Night (Vintage ,2015) and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn (Macmillan, 1977). The most notable novels of this kind include plenty of tension, conflict, drama, and plot in the intimate relationships of their older protagonists. Of course, there are also occasional works that portray older characters mostly in their present-day lives, showing us not only how life experiences have shaped the characters’ worldviews but also how older people are often undervalued, ignored, overlooked, or at odds with society. When we do get fiction with older protagonists who aren’t merely stereotypical curmudgeons or eccentrics, much of the storytelling involves them flashing back to their younger selves - as is the case with, say, Penelope Lively‘s Moon Tiger (Grove Press, 1997), Paul Harding‘s Tinkers (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009) and Pablo Villalobos‘s I’ll Sell You a Dog (And Other Stories, 2016) One of the major side-effects of a publishing industry fixated on young writers, especially with fiction, is that we don’t get a lot of significant works that address aging fully and properly with all its attendant concerns, challenges, joys, and journeys.