Short Takes

Fish chooses his sentences with care and cunning, culling examples from Bunyan to Swift to Hemingway to Updike. He divides sentences into three main types: the subordinating, the additive, the satiric. He is particularly clever in discussing first and last sentences. I especially liked his discussions of the “insolent beauty’’ of J.D. Salinger’s first sentence in “The Catcher in the Rye’’ and “Tristram Shandy’s’’ first digressive flight. Especially sensitive and persuasive are his readings of the alliterative final sentence of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby’’ and the heart-stopping negation of the final line of James’s “The Wings of the Dove.’’ His one howler is his complete misreading of the final line of “Wuthering Heights.’’ Having eloquently described the limitations of the dull narrator of “The Good Soldier,’’ he misses the conventional stupidity of Lockwood, the wrong-headed narrator of Brontë’s unearthly love story.

LASTINGNESS: The Art of Old Age
By Nicholas Delbanco
Grand Central, 272 pp., $24.99

This is an unintentional portrait of the artist as an old(er) man. As the prolific Delbanco (two dozen published books) approaches 70, he asks himself: How long can I go on? How have others done it? Thus he transforms his personal obsession with his unknown future into a series of brief meditations on artists who have enlarged or shifted their art in old age.

He is most generous and compassionate describing the final trajectories of artists he especially admires — Claude Monet, who retired to his own garden and lily pond; Pablo Casals, who traded public performance for private play; W.B. Yeats, Pablo Picasso, John Updike, all of whom continued to create new and great art up to the end.