Review: A novel about aging, ailing and the inevitability of death
(iStock)Muriel Spark was only 40 years old when she published Memento Mori, her delicious satire about an aging circle of acquaintances who receive mysterious phone calls reminding them that they must die. By contrast, the distinguished American novelist A. G. Mojtabai is in her late 80s; she knows whereof she writes in Featherless, her new novel about aging, ailing and the inevitability of death. In this, she joins so many other prominent contemporary fiction writers (Toni Morrison, Phillip Roth, Marilynne Robinson and Margaret Atwood, to name a few) who have explored aging late in their careers.
Featherless, which takes place in the Shady Rest Home for the Aged, reminds me not so much of Mojtabai’s contemporaries’ work as of classics like “King Lear”and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It especially reminds me of Memento Mori, though Spark and Mojtabai would never be mistaken for one another stylistically. Spark’s language is rich in allusion, metaphor and barb, while Mojtabai’s is spare and direct, her wit dry and subtle. Spark’s characters are drawn in outsize comic outline, whereas Mojtabai’s are sketched sympathetically, if sometimes wryly.
Yet the two writers share a tendency to dispense with many of the conventions of realism, even when describing a realistic setting, and their work often approaches allegory. Featherless might be called what the late novelist and critic David Lodge called Memento Mori: a “moral fable.”
Rather than structuring her novel in a narrative arc that follows a protagonist’s conflicts and crises, Mojtabai’s method involves quickly and briefly entering the consciousness of a number of different characters, showing perspectives often filled with worry, fear and panic.
The old folks of Featherless have plenty of ailments to fret about. A reader first sees several of them lined up on a bench, three men and two women, “featherless bipeds.” Overhead, five birds line up on a branch until one of the birds takes flight: “Now there are four.” The opening chapter––stark, beautiful and complete in six lines––lays out Mojtabai’s concerns: how even the most ordinary scene can be filled with pattern and beauty; how creatures congregate and to what purpose; how we must look at human aging in the context of all creation; and how life is filled with disappearance and loss.
One of the men on the bench, a reader quickly learns, is not old at all. Daniel is a young employee of the nursing home, as close as this novel comes to a protagonist. He is granted the most narrative space and interacts the most with the other characters, but his own story is not central in the way it might be in a more conventional novel.
Daniel works 10 hours a day and fears being “on call forever.” Most of his own worry centers on whether he will ever leave Shady Rest and a job he has fallen into rather than actively sought. An orphan since early childhood, raised by his grandparents, he is not afraid of or turned off by old people—it was he who shepherded his grandfather through his final days––but everything in his life, including his solitude when he’s not in the nursing home, seems “provisional.”
A couple of the nurses who befriend Daniel think of him as “an old soul,” but one will later wonder whether he isn’t just a little “dim.” His grandmother was protective of him because of his minor heart ailment, an affliction whose very existence he now sometimes doubts. Yet he thinks he might be good at this job, which involves everything from interviewing new residents of the assisted living wing to informing current residents when they need to be moved to the memory care unit. A reader comes to see that he is indeed very good at it, because so much of his interior life is devoted to his simple and direct concern about what his aged charges are going through, even as he deals with his own anxiety.
Insofar as there is a recognizable plot to Featherless, it concerns Daniel’s responses to the failing health of the residents. But Mojtabai is equally interested in how the residents respond to their own declines. Eli, who sports a bad combover and repels the female residents with his come-ons, becomes more and more confused as he loses both his directional bearings and his ability to recall words. But when he intuits a plan to move him to memory care, he rebels, inspired by watching an escape “skit” at a 100-year-old resident’s birthday party.
A newer resident, Wiktor, who holds himself aloof, reflects that the skit’s escaping centenarian is only “[f]ree to the full extent of her chain and easily reeled back in.” Wiktor is full of contempt for Eli but is himself chained by his Parkinson’s disease, with its alarming symptoms of dyskinesia (involuntary movement) and festination (a sensation of being stuck). An archivist in his younger days, he muses: “Who was it that called human beings ‘featherless bipeds’ and why? The reason seemed pretty obvious: to take them down a notch.” Indeed, it is Wiktor’s impulse, entering Shady Rest, to take his fellow residents down a notch—but by novel’s end, as he loses more and more control over his own body, he becomes “nicer now than before.”
The shifting perspectives of so many residents and employees allow the reader to form a vision of this community as “one body, many moving parts,” a phrase also used by Maddie, who dreams of her fellow residents in a circle dance until Eli breaks free. It is also Maddie who fields a young reporter’s query about what these old folks find to do all day: “How to explain? We breathe. We dream. We remember. We talk to people and sometimes they answer.” And it is Maddie who remembers asking her husband: “What is it you want, Al? I can’t tell anymore.” He answers: “Everything.”
This novel asks the most basic philosophical questions about what it is we humans want––about the meaning of our living, suffering and dying––even as climate change escalates and Covid-19 begins its inexorable spread.
A. G. Mojtabai’s long and distinguished career examining our commercialized and alienated culture has often been informed by her abiding interests in religious faith, despair and witness. Because she has so often written about Catholic characters, including priests, she is often mistaken for a Catholic novelist; while she may be more worthy of that honorific than many a baptized Catholic, she is not. She studied philosophy before becoming a novelist, and all her work is imbued with a spirit of deep inquiry and an unusual measure of forgiveness for her characters’ foibles.
Featherless is brief enough that some will consider it a novella, but the concision of Mojtabai’s writing here is beautifully balanced by the generosity of her vision, particularly her insistence on humanity as “one body.” We meet the characters of this novel only briefly and spend little time with some of them before they disappear from this earth forever, but we sense throughout the author’s solidarity with them, no matter how comically or helplessly they behave.
Featherless is not only an important contribution to the literature of aging, but a moving addition to A. G. Mojtabai’s impressive and instructive body of work.
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