SENIOR DATING

Karp’s novel explores dating in the sunset years.

Greg Kramer finds himself alone for the first time in his life. He grew up in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach with his sister Abby, married a woman and had three children (Jessica, Hillary, and Vicky), got divorced, became a CPA, and relocated to Boca Raton, Florida. There, he fell in love with another woman, married her, and lived with her for 20 years until her sudden and unexpected death. As the book opens, he’s in his 70s, poised to confront the world alone. At his kids’ request, he attends some bereavement meetings. One woman says she misses her husband after his “recent” death—40 years ago; a man confesses that he misses his dead wife so much that he wears her underwear. Kramer starts to think bereavement meetings might not be for him. He dives into dating instead, even though the prospect makes him nervous, as if he were a young man again. His prospects sometimes seem bleak, and the paths to potential romance can be downright strange—the cashier at the local deli, for instance, sees that he’s ordering for one person, assumes he’s single, and asks if he’d like to meet her mother. Kramer goes through one misadventure after another, finally dating a woman named Gwen with whom he really clicks, but even this development has its awkward moments, as when Gwen’s 8-year-old granddaughter spots him in bed in his Donald Duck pajamas. Throughout the novel, Karp skillfully employs the same tone of puckish dry humor that made his earlier books so enjoyable; his Greg Kramer is a lovable everyman figure who relatably navigates the sometimes-surreal landscape of dating in later life. When one promising date asks Kramer if he’d like to pet her 40-pound ocelot, he quips, “No, I value my fingers”; his other encounters are equally strange and amusing.

A gently funny and endearing look at elder romance.