SOURCE: “Charting the Frontier Called Age,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 13, 1987, p. 11.

In the following review, Drake offers an unfavorable assessment of Age.

What to make of this slender novel/novella by Hortense Calisher? It is as fragile and paradoxical as the state of its protagonists, a spunky pair—he a poet, she an architect—who are confronting the last frontier: the uncharted territory of age.

These two, Rupert and Gemma, have made a pact in their 70s to keep separate journals of their life together. The journals are to be read only when one of them dies, which means only the survivor gets to read both. It’s a curious, not entirely logical idea, troubling even to the characters as characters.

It allows Calisher the conceit of giving us introspective views of the same life seen through different angles of a shared prism. In this...