It’s not easy to turn a character who thinks of himself as a “crashing bore,” a “wretched old guy, a tattered coat upon a stick,” into a genuinely appealing protagonist. But that’s exactly what Louis Begley has done in THE NEW LIFE OF HUGO GARDNER, a sophisticated story about the meaning of life and love in a life fortunate enough to last into its ninth decade.

Things don’t begin well for Hugo Gardner, who learns, courtesy of a hostile lawyer’s phone call on the novel’s first page, that his wife of nearly 40 years urgently wants a divorce. Two decades younger than her 84-year-old husband, Valerie, a successful food writer, likens living with him to “living with a corpse,” as she cold-bloodedly reveals her affair with the owner of a chic New York restaurant. The divorce is swift and surgical, leaving Hugo “in a state of shock compounded of disbelief and profound sadness,” but still in possession, at least, of the couple’s apartment in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood and a home in Bridgehampton, Long Island.

"...a sophisticated story about the meaning of life and love in a life fortunate enough to last into its ninth decade.... [A]nyone in or about to enter life’s final decades will find in it both amusement and truth."

A former foreign correspondent and longtime managing editor of Time magazine, Hugo is at work on a critical book about the Bush administration and the Iraq War, one in which he “oscillated between rage at what the Bush-Cheney duo had done to the country…and wild merriment at their stupidity.” That project earns him an invitation to speak at a conference on American politics in Paris.

When he arrives, on a whim he reaches out to Jeanne Brillard, the woman he had rejected for Valerie while serving as Time’s bureau chief in the 1970s, “if only so that we can each take stock of the games time has played with us.” The woman he meets in 2015 instantly, and unmistakably, evokes Hugo’s feelings for his former lover. Jeanne’s husband Hubert, a member of a prominent French family, has suffered from dementia for years, and her life, for all its elegant trappings, is circumscribed by his need for constant care.

Begley’s portrait of two elderly people, former lovers encountering each other again after a lapse of decades, is tender but unsentimental. There seems to be little regret for what might have been, as they share sumptuous lunches and dinners (and copious quantities of fine wine) at elegant Paris restaurants. And as Begley (who’s 86 years old himself) describes with unabashed enthusiasm, Hugo’s reconnection with Jeanne is an advertisement for the persistence of sexual desire, even among a pair of octogenarians.

The pleasures and complications of Hugo’s reinvigorated love life are only part of his story. He has another, more urgent, problem: his slow-growing prostate cancer that is now showing signs of becoming more aggressive, and he must decide whether or not to switch from watchful waiting to active treatment. In the economical style that’s characteristic of his prose, Begley effectively portrays Hugo’s dilemma as he weighs the choice between radiation therapy and allowing the disease to proceed unimpeded, even considering the possibility of ending his life with an assisted suicide in Switzerland. He describes that thinking to his doctor, perhaps contemplating Hubert’s plight as he does so:

“Please don’t feel concerned. I’m not tired of life. I love life even though I’m lonely and often unhappy. But I want to live on my own terms. That means being capable of thought, of making my own decisions, of moving around without a walker or wheelchair.”

Begley’s resolution of Hugo’s rekindled affair after he returns to New York on the eve of the “conceited, malevolent asshole” Donald Trump’s election is abrupt, but true to the novel’s frank, if often wistful, tone. The patrician Hugo Gardner is worldly, but not world weary, even for someone of his years. His voice is tart and self-aware, the perspective of an intelligent, sophisticated man who has seen much --- both good and bad --- and views it all through unblinkered eyes. While it may have less appeal to readers whose twilight years still stretch out over the horizon, anyone in or about to enter life’s final decades will find in it both amusement and truth.