Shop till you drop

Within the past month I have been to an 80th and a 90th birthday lunch, both of them highly festive occasions. And now here is an entertaining, erudite and thought-provoking meditation on the matter of age by Jane Miller (aged 78). The so-called twilight years are no longer quite that, for some of us. This book takes a look at the experience of age, and the perception of age, using the writer’s own engagement with it for the former, and for the latter the promptings of a well-stocked mind to demonstrate how literature has reflected life. Those called in range from Simone de Beauvoir through Bellow, Updike, Roth to Turgenev and Tolstoy. A roll-call that sounds daunting, but is not: Jane Miller writes with an elegance and wry wit that enables her to dip back and forth between old age as seen in books to old age as lived, her own in particular.

It is in a sense another country — and one we never anticipated. This reviewer (77) found herself nodding in agreement: the accumulation of ailments, the awful familiarity with hospital waiting-rooms, the black hole in the head into which disappear words and names. The way in which we no longer want the things that were once central to life: sex and shopping are cited. I was reminded of my father, in his eighties, gleefully recounting the comment of a contemporary of his: ‘D’you know, I used to be extremely interested in pretty girls, and now I can’t for the life of me remember why.’

Jane Miller has been a teacher, and then, for 22 years, a teacher of graduate teachers at the London University Institute of Education. But she more or less fell into a career, she says — a young mother in the mid-century when the expectations of middle-class women were rather different.