The final frontier

Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide
Michael Kinsley
Tim Duggan Books
2016, pp 160, $18

Journalist Michael Kinsley was 43 when he learnt he had Parkinson’s disease, and about 50 when he announced that fact to the world. Parkinson’s is a slow sickness. Kinsley is now 65, with body more or less intact, and wits entirely so, if his superb new book is any indication.

Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide isn’t really about Parkinson’s. It’s about ageing in general. More specifically, it’s about how the baby boomer generation, which is now rounding third base like a herd of buffalo and stampeding for home plate, will choose to think and act in the face of it.

“Sometimes I feel like a scout from my generation, sent out to experience in my 50s what even the healthiest boomers are going to experience in their 60s, 70s or 80s,” Kinsley writes. “There are far worse medical conditions than Parkinson’s, and there are far worse cases of Parkinson’s than mine. But what I have, at the level I have it, is an interesting foretaste of our shared future.”

Kinsley put off telling people about his medical condition, partly out of denial. Also, he didn’t want to tap too early into the “vat of sympathy from friends and family.” He was concerned that he’d be written off professionally. He reports being offered the editorship of The New Yorker in 1998, 5 years after his diagnosis. The result, in terms of how others would view his condition, was dismaying.

“I told the owner, Si Newhouse, that I had Parkinson’s and invited him to change his mind, but he generously said it didn’t matter,” Kinsley writes. “A few hours later, though, he withdrew the offer with no explanation. I chose to believe him that the Parkinson’s didn’t matter. To withdraw the offer for that reason would be, among other things, probably illegal. But I also doubt that he would have made the offer in the first place if he’d known.”

This is probably the place to remark that reading Old Age: A Beginner’s Guide depressed the hell out of me. Not because it is a dirge. Hardly. Kinsley is as rational and appealing as one can be about our coming exits from this world.

It depressed me because of the realisation that he is now more or less officially old, whatever that means in 2016, and we don’t have more books from him. Kinsley possesses what is probably the most envied journalistic voice of his generation: skeptical, friendly, possessed of an almost Martian intelligence. If we ever do meet Martians, or any alien civilisation, he has my vote as the human who should handle Earth’s side of the initial negotiations.

Kinsley has several previous books, including Big Babies (1995) and Please Don’t Remain Calm (2008), but they are collections of opinion columns. If you want to get picky about it, and I don’t, Old Age is a collection of previously published material, too. Its chapters have appeared in Time, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. What’s wanted is a whole shelf of his books. Memo to Kinsley: Can you get on this in the time you have left?The business of what we leave behind when we die is a crucial element of Old Age.” We are going to be dead for far longer than we were alive, and how we are remembered matters.

Kinsley destroys the notion that, as the bumper sticker has it, he who dies with the most toys wins. “The passion for things and the hunger to acquire them are deeply rooted in yuppie culture,” he writes. “I win if my house is bigger than yours, or if my cellphone is smaller. Or if my laptop computer is thinner or my hiking boots are thicker. And yet all this is meaningless, isn’t it? And I don’t mean that in a spiritual or moral way. Be as greedy and self-centred as you want. The only competition that matters, in the end, is about life itself. And the standard is clear: ‘Mine is longer than yours.’” Or, as he puts it more succinctly, “Welcome to the age of competitive longevity.”

One topic Kinsley doesn’t really touch in Old Age is how expensive, and thus how unevenly distributed, good health care is. He is married to Patty Stonesifer, the former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, so he is luckier than most of us in terms of not having to worry so much about this aspect of his winding down.

Old Age is a personal book. We learn about Kinsley’s swimming routine, his medications, the wires in his brain and the two pacemaker-like batteries in his chest, his bad back and about how he feels infantilised because he can no longer drive.

Kinsley has a proposal for what he calls “a generational gesture, something that will be the equivalent of — if not actually equal to — our parents’ sacrifice in fighting and winning World War II — some act of generosity and sacrifice that will inspire or embarrass the next generation.”