In 1950 the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson proposed that we tender, fallible humans pass through eight stages of development, each defined by a different conflict. The final stage: Ego Integrity Versus Despair.
Cheering terminology, I know.
The idea is that when we’re older, we face an existential reckoning: We can either make peace with our choices, dunderheaded as some might have been, or we can spend our final years in a hair shirt of our own regrets.
Though Ian Brown never says it outright, this struggle lies at the heart of “Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year,” a great, fat rosebush of a book that’s beautiful and pungent and, at moments, deceptively prickly.
In his preface, Mr. Brown says that he wrote this book — which is exactly what the subtitle declares, a diary starting on the day of his 60th birthday and concluding on his 61st — because “original, truthful, sad but amused, authentic writing on the subject of getting older is in quite short supply.”
He’s right. As I read “Sixty,” I kept thinking, why have so few people done this well? It really is a splendid idea, a frank account of getting older. (There was Nora Ephron’s delightful “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” but she turned aging into a comedy of manners, for the most part.) Mr. Brown, a highly regarded journalist in Canada and author of “The Boy in the Moon” — a moving, unsparing memoir about his disabled son — is well suited to the task, taking a microscope to his grizzling soul and reporting everything he sees, even the bacteria crabbing along its surface.
He writes about sex. His fantasies, jealousies, occasional combustive failures: “The engine’s turning over, but the alternator won’t catch.” He writes about memory. Particularly the middle-age brain termites that make you scramble dates, grope for words, delay your departure from the house: “Clothes. Wallet. Keys. Phone. Phone? Keys? Wallet? Book bag. Yes. Out the door. Forgot the car keys. Back in.”
He writes about his newfound neuroses, which he knows are not becoming. “I spend an embarrassing amount of time every single day,” he writes, “thinking about who is younger than me, and who is older.” The preoccupation drives him to websites that compile names of fellow 60-year-olds. When he discovers that Vladimir V. Putin is one, he’s no longer impressed. “Hitler,” he writes, “was only 49 when he invaded Poland.”
And his body! Mr. Brown has plantar fasciitis, which means his heels hurt a lot. He takes eyedrops to prevent glaucoma. He develops rashes easily (“I look like Spider-Man’s costume”); he wears hearing aids (“appallingly unsexy”); his skin blooms with age spots, which appear “with such speed and frequency I feel like a special effect — the man who is turning sepia before his photograph can.”
But the questions he really addresses — the substantive, tricky ones that give this book both its prickle and its pith — are Eriksonian in nature. “At 60, after all,” Mr. Brown writes, “you are suddenly looking into the beginning of the end, the final frontier where you will either find the thing your heart has always sought, which you have never been able to name, or you won’t.”
Mistakes at this stage seem devilishly hard to reverse. It jars Mr. Brown to realize that he may no longer have time to get around to everything he wished to do, a notion his young self blithely took for granted.
“I look back at my life before 40 and deplore what I see; I hate myself for my lack of seriousness, my lack of productivity,” he writes, adding: “I knew nothing, understood nothing, had not grasped how one must start working and keep working, early on and every day, if one is to create something to show for one’s life.”
These admissions are the strength of “Sixty” — such introspection and candor are rare elements on the periodic table of writerly assets — but they are also its weakness. Mr. Brown devotes a goodly number of diary entries to his professional shortcomings: his failure to specialize as a writer, his lifelong aversion to risk (why didn’t he write a novel?). Reading Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” on the evening of May 25 occasions special remorse — the conviction he’s wasted his life, “wrecked it, spoiled it.”
I recognize that diaries are a place for uncompromising honesty. But this one has been written and shaped for public consumption; I wish Mr. Brown’s editor had noted that there’s a moment, as imperceptible as the changing of the seasons, when repeated self-criticism morphs into a twitchy self-loathing. Mr. Brown may not have become the writer he hoped he’d be, but he’s certainly done well: He’s hosted shows on CBC Radio and TVOntario; he’s a familiar name to readers of The Globe and Mail in Toronto; and his book about his son, Walker, won the RBC Taylor Prize.
I also feel protective of him. He hasn’t sufficient compassion for himself.
And I wonder if women — even those who’ve zoomed ahead in their careers, their feet heavy on the gas pedal — might find his inner soundtrack of self-recrimination a bit alienating. I’m not quite 47, so who am I to say, but I do not think that I will be berating myself at 60 for having failed to land my own series on HBO or done as well as Jerry Seinfeld.
When he’s not thrashing about in a tub of self-disgust, however, Mr. Brown is charming, thoughtful and edifying company. There’s loads to identify with in “Sixty.” More than that: There’s loads to flat-out adore.
Mr. Brown’s reflections on friendship are soulful and worth committing to heart. So are his meditations on marriage and parenthood. He reads and quotes promiscuously — nothing terribly obscure, it should be said, just the comfort foods of literature — but who doesn’t love being reminded that Philip Larkin called life the “million-petaled flower of being here”?
And prose snobs will love him. To borrow a phrase he uses about Robin Williams, his writing quicksilvers along; his capsule descriptions are sublime. Morgan Fairchild, who appears awfully plump in the bust and cantilevered into her own face, “looks like a genetically modified nectarine on two genetically modified grapefruit.” A troublesome hemorrhoid “feels like the clover-leafed exchange of two multilane highways.” (Have I mentioned that “Sixty” is funny?)
For all his talk about regret — and making these last innings count — Mr. Brown seems to recognize that control is an illusion. And there’s comfort in this idea, isn’t there? Mr. Brown closes his 61st year saying as much. “One’s life shapes itself, regardless of one’s efforts to curve it one way or another,” he writes. “It would still be gratifying (that’s the word) to think the shape of my life might emerge out of the future mist, and that it might still be a surprise.”
Sixty
A Diary of My Sixty-First Year
The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?
By Ian Brown
299 pages. The Experiment. $24.95.
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