I blame book clubs. If you belong to a library-run book club, you may have noticed a predilection for your reading list to comprise novels with older protagonists. The age range for ‘older’ can be anything from 50 to 80 or more, which is frightening from wherever you are standing on the timeline. These characters are considered remarkable by the miracle of being both older and yet interested and active participants in the world around them. The protagonists are (pick as many as apply):
- Feisty
- Quirky
- Characters (as in ‘she’s a real character’)
- Eccentric
- Outspoken (but with a timid sidekick)
- Timid (but with an outspoken sidekick)
And, almost universally,
- Stuck in their ways (but will become adventurous by the end).
This is not to say that such books don’t make an entertaining read. They are a pleasant way to spend an effortless afternoon. Amongst my fellow book club members, the consensus ratings of these books were 3/5. Such books are usually well-written and well-edited to achieve that magic page turning quality. However, it’s the underlying characterisation of age that strikes me as open to question.
Here’s a summary of 2018’s teeth-gritting reading, including their publishers’ blurbs (in no particular order):
Hester and Harriet by Hilary Spiers (2015, Allen & Unwin) – genre mystery/’domestic fiction’
‘Hold on to your tea cups – you’re about to fall head over heels for Hester and Harriet, whose quiet and ordered Christmas celebrations are turned upside down with the arrival of their runaway teenage nephew and a young refugee woman and her baby.’
It wasn’t until I was about half-way into this book that I realised the ‘elderly’ sisters were in their early 60s.
The Fence by Meredith Jaffe (2016, Macmillan)
‘Gwen Hill has lived on Green Valley Avenue all her adult life. Here she brought her babies home, nurtured her garden and shared life’s ups and downs with her best friend and neighbour, Babs. So when Babs dies and the house next door is sold, Gwen wonders how the new family will settle into the quiet life of this cosy community. …Soon the neighbours are in an escalating battle that becomes about more than just council approvals, and boundaries aren’t the only things at stake.’
Jaffe teeters between a savage and insightful recognition of the realities of ageing (for example, the care of a dementing husband) and satirical farce as events compound as the older characters behave in increasingly irrational ways.
Lost & Found by Brooke Davis (2015, Hachette)
‘At seven years old, Millie Bird realises that everything is dying around her. She wasn’t to know that after she had recorded twenty-seven assorted creatures in her Book of Dead Things her dad would be a Dead Thing, too. Agatha Pantha is eighty-two and has not left her house since her husband died. She sits behind her front window, hidden by the curtains and ivy, and shouts at passers-by, roaring her anger at complete strangers. Until the day Agatha spies a young girl across the street. Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven when his son kisses him on the cheek before leaving him at the nursing home. As he watches his son leave, Karl has a moment of clarity. He escapes the home and takes off in search of something different. Three lost people needing to be found. But they don’t know it yet. Millie, Agatha and Karl are about to break the rules and discover what living is all about.’
This book distinguishes itself from the others by attempting to embrace the sexuality of the older person. However, when Agatha and Karl fall to their knees and make passionate love in the sandy desert, our book club members were unanimous in shrieking: not on the ground!!
The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree by Susan Wittig Albert (2010, Berkley)
‘The good old ladies of Darling, Alabama, are determined to keep their town beautiful. The Darling Dahlias garden club is off to a good start until rumors of trouble at a bank, an escaped convict, and a ghost digging around their tree surface. If anyone can get to the root of these mysteries, it’s the Darling Dahlias.’
Be warned – it’s a series.
This tendency to view older people as ‘cute’ or ‘dear things’ is the reverse side to the more serious ageist coin where older people are absent, invisible, or fragile/disabled/unwell/burdensome. There has been academic scholarship and debate exploring the perpetuation of ageist stereotypes in literature that is highly relevant to the dark side of this issue. I’d suggest that the lighter side is potentially just as damaging.
Looking at the novels I have endured this year in my book club, I have developed a maxim:
“The younger the author, the quainter the older protagonist.”
The portrayal of older protagonists by older authors is strikingly different. For example, this year we also read 86-year-old John Le Carré’s brilliant return to the world of Smiley and Guillam, ‘A Legacy of Spies (2018, Penguin).
Peter Guillam may be getting hard-of-hearing and he’s not above exploiting perceptions of failing aged memory, but he remains as sharp as his mentor.
If I’m fortunate enough to live as long as Le Carré, I’d love to read the novels that quaint-ifiers write in twenty or more years’ time and see if their characterisation of their protagonists has changed.