num_pages: 213
description: In the ten years since her first short story was published in TriQuarterly (and promptly awarded a Pushcart Prize), Jane Smiley’s reputation as a gifted writer of remarkable range has grown steadily, through the publication of three novels and more than a dozen short stories (two of them O. Henry Award winners). Now, in a superb first collection—of five stories and a novella—she contemplates with a wry intelligence how we variously construe and misconstrue the often incompatible matters of love, friendship, and marriage.“Marriage is such a mystery to me,” says Florence, obsessively studying the elegant couple who have moved in next door (and missing the meaning of their interest in her)…Liliy, single for so long that she fears she is “turning back into a virgin,” sees in the barely contained violence between her married weekend guests an enviable “kind of attractive complexity”…A would-be seductress reveals her designs on an elusive and handsome gay friend (“Humanity was what I was thinking of. Humanity and, specifically, the gene pool”)…A man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape…A radical (wanted by the FBI since the sixties for building bombs) who has created a safe, pseudonymous life for herself in the Midwest, now feels an irresistible urge to destroy what she has made, to blow apart the firm shape of her life by returning to New York to find her mother.The novella, “The Age of Grief,” is an incandescently wise and moving meditation on the fine pertinacity of love that turns on a man’s conviction that his wife has fallen in love with someone else and his wrenching certainty that “the object of her affections” has refused her. Grieving for himself, grieving for her, he desperately tries to recover what he calls “the ironic middle,” the good-humored and matter-of-fact heart of the marriage, where he can keep her from knowing that he knows, where he can keep a secret of his own complicated sorrow.A long-awaited collection that eloquently demonstrates Jane Smiley’s generous and splendid gifts.
language: English
title: The Age of Grief
titlecomplete: The Age of Grief
genres: Fiction, Relationships, Short Stories, Womens, Literature, Marriage, Novels, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 2852
awards: awardedAt: 473414400000
name: O. Henry Award
category: 'Lily', awardedAt: 536486400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Alfred A. Knopf