As a Man Grows Older

"Though As A Man Grows Older thus lacks the final apocalyptic touch which upsets the balance of the Confessions of Zeno as a work of art but at the same time raises it to the level of a revelation, the earlier novel's sheer perfection is indeed rare in the literature of our age. It is a perfection which was born of a great leisure, when the full attention of some privileged artists could be devoted, as in the last decades of the heyday of the bourgeois world of private enterprise, to the patterning of details."--Edouard Roditi, in his prefatory essay