OLD AGE
A Beginner’s Guide
Michael Kinsley
Tim Duggan Books
160 pages; $18
Longevity breeds literature. As people (including writers) live longer thanks to medical advances, we can expect many more books contemplating the vicissitudes of aging, illness and dying. These topics, previously thought uncommercial, not to mention unsexy, have been eloquently explored recently by Diana Athill (Somewhere Towards the End), Roger Angell (This Old Man) and Christopher Hitchens (Mortality), among others. Now that the baby boom generation, defined as those born between 1946 and 1964, "enter life's last chapter," Michael Kinsley writes, "there is going to be a tsunami of books about health issues by every boomer journalist who has any, which ultimately will be all of them." Hoping to scoop the others, he has written Old Age, a short, witty "beginner's guide," with an appropriate blend of sincerity and opportunism.
Mr Kinsley is a well-known columnist for Vanity Fair; contributor to The New Yorker; former editor of The New Republic, Harper's and other periodicals; founder of Slate; and frequently seen liberal commentator on television. His distinguished career had been turning him into something of a public pundit when, in 1993, at the age of 43, he learned he had Parkinson's disease. For eight years he tried to keep his condition secret, understandably. "Anyone who develops a chronic disease in midcareer dreads being written off - being thought of prematurely in the past tense." Despite the commiseration of co-workers, a yuppie may find that "guess what? You've had your last promotion."
Though Mr Kinsley mastered denial (a practice he advocates slyly) and bluffed good health, eventually his physical symptoms became too obvious and he outed himself with a column in Time. After going public, he found himself the object of intense scrutiny and unwanted sympathy. "There are people who now only see the Parkinson's - like the woman at a dinner party who offered to cut my meat into pieces for me even though she had just seen me wolfing a first course with no trouble."
Still, the book refuses to wallow in self-pity or offer triumphalist narratives of overcoming victimhood. Rather, Mr Kinsley is intent on being wryly realistic about coping with illness and the terminal prospects ahead. He makes fun of a fellow boomer, Larry Ellison, chief executive officer of Oracle, who has spent millions in a quest for eternal life, and who was quoted as saying, "Death has never made any sense to me." Mr Kinsley quips: "Actually the question is not whether death makes sense to Larry Ellison but whether Larry Ellison makes sense to death. And I'm afraid he does."
He is equally sardonic on the prospect of losing one's marbles. Once he learns that Parkinson's, thought simply as a "movement disorder" that makes parts of the body shake or stiffen, can also adversely affect intellectual capacity, he keeps a close watch on his thinking. There follows a hilarious section in which he submits to a round of cognitive assessment tests, cheating a bit but still dismayed to find that some of his scores have decreased.
"The book is supposed to be funny, as well, on a subject that does not lend itself to humor." And funny it is, for the most part. Drawing on his extensive experience as a columnist "whose lifetime output mainly has been a thousand words or so a week commenting on current affairs," he catches our attention quickly, sets up questions that need answering and writes in a clear, conversational, short-sentence manner, addressing the reader with rhythmic little pokes, prods, provocations. His transitions mock tendencies to self-absorption or senior-moment forgetfulness. ("Where were we? Oh yes, I decided to have myself tested.")
Regardless of his assertion that "this is not a book about Parkinson's disease," that condition remains a central preoccupation in the text, the other one being the hopes and worries of the boomer generation. Curiously, what the book is not about, despite its title, is old age. Mr Kinsley, still only in his 60s, has not yet entered the kingdom of the elderly, though he may feel he has been given a precocious peek at it. As kidney stones were for Montaigne a teacher of wisdom and equanimity, so Parkinson's has been for this author.
He almost ruins it all with a conclusion recommending that the boomers redeem themselves with a final sacrifice - wiping out the nation's debt. By having the money they leave behind sufficiently taxed when they die, he argues, they could leave a legacy that parallels the Greatest Generation's achievement in World War II. Backtracking a bit from this cockamamie scheme, he nevertheless takes it seriously enough to devote the whole last chapter to it. The real mistake, economic realities aside, is to have abandoned the more charmingly intimate, skeptical persona he had so meticulously built up beforehand, trading it in for a pundit's robes.
The book is attractively designed and just the right size to slip into one's pocket or purse. In short, it's been packaged as a nifty impulse purchase. One could do worse than give in to the impulse. If it's possible for a book about illness and death to be delightful, this one fills the bill.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
