["Autumn"] speaks with force and clarity to the [unease of loneliness]…. A short, quiet-voiced tale, it describes a few days in the life of a recently widowed 66-year-old accountant named Will Ross—a man under pressure to move out of the Maine seacoast cottage he and his wife had imagined, during 20 years of summer vacations, as their probable retirement home. The key to the book's value lies in its alertness to the varieties of feeling awakened in those newly alone.

At one moment—during an outbreak of intense sexual heat—Mrs. Mojtabai's widowed hero has a sudden, fresh comprehension of what it means to be utterly free and experiences aloneness as thrilling independence. At other moments, talking aloud to his departed mate in her garden shed or in the kitchen, or asking if by chance she heard the weather on television, Ross is hazy about where his mind...