SOURCE: “Age: Laying Bare Life's Fears, Triumphs,” in Chicago Tribune Books, October 6, 1987, p. 3.

In the following review, Yuenger offers a positive evaluation of Age.

For more than 40 years, Hortense Calisher’s pen has served as a scalpel slicing through to the emotional underside of American life and quietly, deftly laying bare its inevitable inconsistencies, its fears and its small triumphs.

Now, aged 75, after 15 novels and a well-received autobiography (Herself) that have placed her firmly in the pantheon of nonblockbuster literary gods who can be depended on for a steady stream of solid craftsmanship, she has written what appears to be a coda—the chronicle of a septuagenarian architect and her husband, a minor poet, whose legacy to each other is an almanac to be read only after one of them dies.

That is no easy task, yet Calisher makes of the archive a gently lyrical paean to the...