AUTUMN

Will Ross, suddenly a widower, decides to stay on through the fall at the Maine resort town where he summers. Married 40 years and now alone, Will doesn't quite know what to do with his days: he reads, but inattentively (the best pages here have Will fumblingly trying to read a paragraph in a paperback mystery, all the words slipping out of sense); he walks; he eats a little. As for incidents, there are only really two of note: a day-trip to Bangor, combining a doctor's visit with a call on a widow whom Will knows (they have very matter-of-fact sex, with a very lonely aftermath); and Will's discovery of a sleeping (or perhaps even comatose) boy in the treehouse on his property. It's the prose, however, not the plot, that is the foundation here. The book is a sustained first-person narrative--folksy, microscopic, comic, unfancy: ""Time to shave and spruce up. Let's have a smile. So hard to face that mirror now. Nose and ears look familiar, but nothing else does. There's some kinship, I see it, to faces I wore ten, twenty, thirty years ago. A family likeness: I might be my own Uncle."" So this carefully crafted portrait--of a life that's gently rocking as it dwindles down--does engender sympathy. But unlike the very similar Fredrick Busch story ""The Old Man Is Snoring"" (collected in Hardwater Country, 1979), Mojtabai's cameo of old age never builds up a sense of spooky, imminent mortality. And the result is artful yet fiat fiction--evoking a time-of-life but finding no particular angle on it.