When is 60 the new 40?

Regular readers will be aware that I’m a big Meg Wolitzer fan (see also here). Her magnum opus was The Interestings, published in 2013, and then a few years later she came out with The Female Persuasion, which was good too—I think that some reviews said that this latter book bit off more than it could chew, but I liked it, both in the sense that it was a fun read and that it made me think. I went back and read most of her other books—they kind of blur in my mind a bit, but that’s more of a function of my aging than anything else; I think that if these books had been available when I was in my twenties, I’d have been able to remember them individually in the way that I did after reading dozens of novels by Graham Greene, Philip K. Dick, George V. Higgins, and other authors who wrote large numbers of ambitious and readable books.

After reading The Female Persuasion, I had a sort of clock going in the back of my mind, reminding me to be aware of when Wolitzer’s next book comes out. I’d expect another novel, but maybe she’s been writing short stories all these years—I bet I’d love a collection of her stories—or maybe collected essays and reviews. But several years have passed, and . . . nothing but some “young adult” books. YA books can be great, but I can’t bring myself to read a Meg Wolizer young adult book—it’s just not what I’m looking for from her.

So whassup?

OK, first things first. Wolitzer doesn’t owe me anything, any more than I owe anybody BDA4 or whatever. In the words of Bill James, she’s not a public utility. If you or I or anyone else wants “the next Meg Wolitzer novel,” and Meg herself doesn’t want to write it, that’s our problem—we should write the damn book ourselves if it’s so important to us.

But it’s not that simple. Wolitzer wrote a book every few years for decades . . . is it too much to hope for her to write a few more?

Well, she is 65. That’s retirement age! When John Updike was in his sixties, he was mostly retired from creative work. He kept writing bad novels, solid nonfiction, and good short stories. But the short stories did show signs of exhaustion: his characters kept talking about how old they were, they were all winding up their lives. Even when Updike was 60 he was writing like that. He was only 60! I’m 60! I don’t feel like I’m winding up my life. 65, though, maybe I’ll feel different then.

Anyway, the point is that, if you go back a few decades, it would be normal to expect that once an author is in her sixties, she’s allowed to retire, or perhaps to continue writing but not at the level of her best work. If you look back at your favorite books, they were mostly written by authors in their 30s and 40s. Anything you get after 60 is pure gravy. Even someone like Elmore Leonard who only became a critical and popular darling when he was older . . . he turned 60 in 1985. He wrote and sold lots of books after 1985, but I’d say his best books were written in the decade before that. So, even a late bloomer such as Leonard peaked in his 50s and, movie career aside, could’ve retired at 60 having produced his greatest works.

Meg Wolitzer, though, I sincerely feel that she has a few more books in her, if she’s healthy and decides to put in the effort. These could be her best books ever! One source of frustration, I guess, is that books don’t sell like they used to. Wolitzer probably doesn’t need the money that would come from a (hypothetical) bestseller, but it’s still gotta be demoralizing to put two years of your life into an intricately-constructed work of fiction, get it out there, reviewed by all the major publications, and still only sell a few tens of thousands of copies or whatever it is. The motivation isn’t there. Unless there’s gonna be a Netflix series or whatever, but I guess we’re past Peak Netflix.

But, yeah, 60 is the new 40 in the sense that I think it’s reasonable to expect that Wolizer could write another wonderful new book for adults—a masterpiece, even, something greater than all her previous work!—even while nobody was expecting that Hemingway or Steinbeck or Updike or Vonnegut or Bellow or Nabokov or Salinger or, for that matter, Agatha Christie or Isaac Asimov or other genre stars, would in their sixties be surpassing their earlier efforts. (Pynchon, maybe, but he’s a special person.)

I would’ve liked George V. Higgins to have kept going in his sixties and beyond—indeed, his two last books were excellent, maybe not his best ever but they pointed in interesting directions, and I always felt that, if he could’ve just taken a breath and worked a bit harder on each book—producing one better book ever two years rather than a sloppy one every year (and who am I to talk, blogging 600 times a year rather than concentrating my efforts on jewel-like articles and books)—maybe he could’ve produced his best work ever. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack at 59, which itself is an old-school way to go.

There’s some sense that the capacity for producing imaginative literature is possible, even routinely possible, at greater ages than we would’ve expected before.

Why is that? Most obviously, people are healthier. It’s hard to do creative work when you’re ground down by disease or chronic pain. Also, the population distribution has changed. For the currently middle-aged (again, it used to be 40 that was “middle-aged,” and here I am attributing that status to 60-year-olds), there are fewer young people coming up behind them. Sure, there are new young writers ever year—hi, Sally Rooney!—but not like it used to be. The Meg Wolitzers have space to write. Also, it just seems that expectations are different: older people can produce more in large part because we no longer feel that, at 60, we’re over the hill.

What about researchers, scientists at the university? Here there’s a famous problem that, now that there’s no retirement age, faculty are routinely staying on through their 70s and 80s. That could be me too soon—who knows?

On the other hand, I do feel we’re able to keep contributing, even at a research level, in a way that wasn’t happening in the past. For example, my adviser, Donald Rubin, born in 1943, made a series of amazing contributions to statistics in his thirties and forties: the potential-outcomes model of causal inference; a new framework for thinking about missing data; the EM algorithm; ideas and methods in hierarchical modeling, computing, and predictive checking which become key building blocks in modern Bayesian workflow; propensity scores; ideas in meta-analysis; integration of sampling and experimental design into Bayesian inference; multiple imputation; principal stratification for instrumental variables—really any one or two of these would’ve represented a brilliant career, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few highlights, it’s like trying to compile a greatest hits album for Elton John or Billy Joel and you’re only allowed 20 tracks—but really nothing big since the age of 50. Or, to be precise, since his paper with Angrist and Imbens that appeared in 1996, when he was 52, but I’m guessing the work was done before his fiftieth birthday.

Again, this is just fine. Don Rubin worked hard, he made multiple enduring contributions to statistics, he doesn’t owe us a continuing flow of deep new ideas. In the three decades since his fiftieth birthday he’s coauthored several influential books, has written thoughtful review articles, participated in applied research topics, taught classes, advised students, etc. My only point is that nowadays we might expect more from a scholar who’s over 50 years old.

Now, we don’t want to go too far in what we expect from oldsters—that way lies madness, in the form of superannuated Nobel prize winners sucking up resources, chasing the dream of ever-greater success in massive biology labs full of scurrying postdocs. But, yeah, here I am at 60, maybe not thinking my very best work is ahead—back in 1990 when I figured out how to monitor the convergence of iterative simulations, at the time I said that this was probably the best idea I would ever have—but, yeah, I have a bunch of new ideas I still want to work out. Part of that has gotta be that I’m surely in better health than the typical 60-year-old professor of decades earlier, but I think that part of it is expectations, what I ask of myself and the duty I feel to the world.

Children as a clock

The development of your childhood, and then of your own children, supplies a sort of clock to your life. Updike had kids young, and by the time he was sixty they were all grown up. Maybe that put him in the old-age category of his being, in a way that’s different for those of us who became parents in our thirties and forties. I looked up Meg Wolitzer and she had her children in her early thirties, so, yeah, by the time she was sixty she was past that intensive-parenting stage of life.

I don’t know what it’s like for people who don’t have children. I imagine that their lives just feel different—not just the lack of those little people underfoot, but also a different structuring of the decades.

Children also provide a clock at the societal level. Recall our discussion from last year, Fewer kids in our future: How historical experience has distorted our sense of demographic norms.