I confess that I tremendously enjoyed The One-Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2009). It wasn’t profound and it wasn’t great literature, but it was laugh-aloud funny and a delightful depiction of someone who is unambiguously old. The recently released sequel, The Accidental Further Adventure of the Hundred-Year-Old-Man,is not quite the masterpiece of comic satire as its predecessor, but it’s a welcome distraction in this time of unrelievedly bad news. But I think the reason I particularly like Jonas Jonasson’s creation is that I appreciate the way he depicts an older person.

The typical reaction to a one-hundred-year-old who remains engaged with life is of the gee-whiz-golly variety: isn’t he amazing! Or, if it’s a woman, isn’t she cute! The old person (and yes, I prefer the locution “old” rather than one of the more politically correct euphemisms) is treated as a curiosity, a zoo specimen, not as a full human being with all his or her foibles and failings. My bias is that we should accept people for who they are—whether they are 50, 75, or 100.

Then there is a whole area of research devoted to studying centenarians (for example, the New England Centenarian Study).The prevailing wisdom is that centenarians are a special breed who have managed to make it to a ripe old age through a combination of genetics, lifestyle and, I would add, luck. Part of what makes them special, in this view, is that they have been spared many of the chronic diseases of old age, suffering perhaps from osteoarthritis, farsightedness (in the medical sense), and cataracts, but with a remarkably low prevalence of heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers interested in centenarians seek to understand just how this phenomenon is achieved and potentially to enable more people to achieve robust longevity. The concept of delaying aging and thereby achieving the long-desired goal of compressing morbidity is decidedly attractive—although I have long suspected that the reason centenarians do not seem to experience a prolonged, albeit late-onset period of gradual organ failure is not that they stay healthy until some breaking point and then fall apart all at once. Rather, I imagine, what happens is that the 80-year-old who gets cancer or heart disease is treated aggressively, allowing that individual to survive long enough to develop other medical problems, which are also vigorously treated, and so forth. The 100-year-old who gets cancer or heart disease, by contrast, is treated palliatively and dies without the opportunity to come down with a second or third or fourth disease. But that’s mere speculation. 

My larger point about centenarians is that studying them as a group for their exceptionalism is all well and good, but we should not forget that the group is made up of individuals. And each of those individuals, like Allan Karlsson in the Jonasson books, is deserving of respect and acceptance as a person. It certainly helps that Karlsson exhibits a rare degree of integrity, good judgment, and cleverness. To be sure, he gets into the most implausible of scrapes—such as when he and his sidekick are rescued by a North Korean ship after their hot air balloon (which they used to leave Bali without being restrained by the resort owner to whom they owed thousands of dollars) fell into the Pacific—but his ingenuity in removing 8 pounds of uranium from the possession of Kim Jong-Un is delightful. He manages to get to the US and plans to hand over the radioactive material to Donald Trump, but thinks better of it after he meets Trump, commenting that “he [Trump] was about to explode even without any blueprints for how it should be done.” Hence, Karlsson explained, he and his friend were “wondering if we might find terminal storage for the documentation in safer hands.”

While not exactly brilliant satire, The Accidental Further Adventures gives us an opportunity to see how western Europeans, in particular Swedes, see figures such as Trump, Putin, and Merkel. It’s an amusing romp and its now 101-year-old protagonist makes an enchanting hero.

Ove-Lite

Think “A Man Called Ove,” Fredrik Backman’s bittersweet novel about a lonely man who tries repeatedly and unsuccessfully to commit suicide but ultimately finds meaning in life by helping others. Water down Ove-- take away his rage against injustice and dilute his frustration with modern technology. Make him 85 instead of 59-going-on-80. Preserve the pet cat, the needy neighbor, and the enduring love for his deceased wife. What you get is the protagonist of Elizabeth Berg’s new novel, “The Story of Arthur Truluv.” The book is a sentimental portrait of another octogenarian, Arthur Moses, nicknamed “Truluv” by the lost teenager he befriends because of his devotion to his wife, whose grave he visits daily. 

It’s high time we had more fictional treatments of older people, so I’m happy we have another contribution to the genre. And Truluv is an endearing old fellow with a big heart—albeit one apparently affected by heart failure. He, unlike Ove, is a glass-half-full sort of a fellow, whereas Ove, at least until the end of his story, is a glass-with-a-hole-in-it sort of a guy. While I appreciate that Berg does not completely sugar coat old age, giving both Arthur and his neighbor Lucille an assortment of maladies and expeditiously killing off Lucille’s elderly boyfriend with a massive heart attack, Arthur is so nice that he’s a bit hard to take. His teenaged friend Maddy, pregnant and estranged from her father, needs both a job and a place to stay? No problem, Arthur lets her move in and serve as his housekeeper. The irksome woman across the street, whose main virtue is her baking skill, decides she’d like to move in, too? Fine, she can do the cooking. Maddy hasn’t seen her father in months and secretly would like to reconcile with him before she gives birth? Arthur intuits what’s going on and invites him for Thanksgiving dinner. 

I’m a pushover for over-the-top amazing octogenarians, so I confess I enjoyed reading this book. It’s short—222 small pages, peppered with dialogue—so I only had to devote a few hours of my life to this endeavor. Maybe I would have liked it more if I hadn’t recently read “A Man Called Ove,” a tragicomic masterpiece with a protagonist who seems old even if he isn’t, a NY Times bestseller that has been translated into 43 languages. But maybe Elizabeth Berg will next turn her talents to writing about an octogenarian who is frail but who nonetheless finds meaning in life. Now that would be a major contribution to the literature on aging.

Parachuting through Life

Last week I saw the play “Ripcord” at the Huntington Theater in Boston, a hilarious comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire, and one of the rare plays that features life among the older set. Ignore the unrealistic depiction of assisted living—the playwright does not seem to distinguish between assisted living facilities and nursing homes—or the mischaracterization of who live in assisted living—the play features two women who are entirely too vigorous to require assisted living, let alone the nursing-home-like facility in Ripcord. It’s nonetheless a vivid, if exaggerated portrait of some of the poignant struggles of older life. Ripcord introduces us to two of the zaniest and most memorable elderly fictional characters in recent memory, Abby and Marilyn, forced by circumstance to become roommates.

Both Abby and Marilyn, in their own very different ways, need to come to terms with troubled relationships. Marilyn was married to an alcoholic and perhaps abusive man; Abby’s only son is a drug addict from whom she has long been estranged. Both women find themselves in a new phase of life and have to adapt to straitened circumstances, a task that Marilyn performs with grace and Abby with vitriol. But redemption comes for both of them, as Marilyn’s ability to see the good in everyone, from the aide at the facility to her lugubrious roommate finally rubs off on Abby, and Abby’s insistence on telling-it-like-it-is allows Marilyn to acknowledge and accept the flaws in her marriage.

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In its eccentric and sometimes over-the-top fashion—the “ripcord” of the title refers to the cord the two older women must pull to open their parachute while skydiving—this play brings to life one of the major insights of contemporary geriatrics: at least as important as pills and procedures for a good quality of life in old age is a robust social network. In the end, it is not fame or fortune that mark a life as having been worth living, but the relationships we forge with others.

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