Volume 19, Number 1 · July 20, 1972
Growing Old
By V.S. Pritchett
The Coming of Age
by Simone de Beauvoir
Putnam's, 608 pp., $10.00
Simone de Beauvoir is one of those writers who dig and dig until they pile up the monumental. Faced by the stretches of dead wasteland in ourselves and our society, in which we dump our unsolved or evaded problems, she settles down to an exhaustive sifting and then rebuilds. She is sometimes portentous, and rarely witty; but her feelings are strong and she is unremitting in her concern. Her present object is to analyze our attitudes to old age. After dealing with the biology of the inevitable decline of the tissues and muscles, she moves on to the behavior of a few primitive societies; next, period by period, from the Greeks and Romans to today; and then to old age as we know it in everyday life. She draws on the words and lives of many rancorous writers, painters, scientists, and musicians who, privileged by their vocations, have closely observed the change that old age has brought to them. Her object is to break the conspiracy of silence on a subject that has become privately and publicly taboo in the advanced countries which are governed by the values of profit-making capitalism.
Review, 3319 words
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