The Age of Grief: A Novella and Stories of Love, Marriage and Friendship

Jane Smiley’s prose is sometimes too earnest, but this short story collection has excellent observations on middle-age (the time “after all that schooling, all that care,” when you realize “the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from”). I also liked this line: “Marriage is a small container, after all, barely large enough to hold some children, two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking, deforming. Or maybe it is not a thing at all, nothing, something not present.”