[Autumn is] a remarkable novel: brief, luminous, intense, unexpectedly humorous. Without a trace of sentimentality, employing no false epiphanies, [Mojtabai] moves Will from a state of despair to an acceptance, even if a limited one, of his lot. With admirable restraint, she leaves him at the end suspended between the earth he is not ready to depart and the heaven that is his ultimate destination; when she brings a teenaged boy into his little world, it is not to set up a facile reconciliation between Youth and Age, but to allow Will to recapture, if only for a moment, his lost sense of wonder. Autumn is a novel of rare subtlety and psychological depth.

It is also an exceptional depiction of old age, a subject only rarely touched upon in American fiction. Though the novel contains only a few events—a visit to the doctor, an encounter with a lonely widow, a tense telephone conversation with Will's grown son, a storm, the discovery of the teenaged boy in Will's son's old treehouse—it ranges across a wide variety of experiences and emotions that old people encounter….

[Mojtabai] manages to capture the patronizing rhetoric with which we attempt to pacify the "elderly" on the one hand and, on the other, Will's fierce, proud rejection of it. He is a man of limited education and horizons, but he is plenty smart enough to understand that society is trying to shunt him off in a corner. In the world of the young, Will is old….

What the young fail to understand, indeed what interests them not at all, is that life continues to percolate in these men and women whom they dismiss as tired and depleted. There could be no more vivid or humorous demonstration of that than Will's brief liaison with Lil Harmon, a chatty, energetic widow who is out to seduce him and wastes no time getting on with it. Though the spirit proves more willing than the flesh, Mojtabai's point is that it is precisely the spirit that matters. She understands that "the old blood still churns," resisting each of Will's efforts to drift into permanent desuetude.

Autumn is a modest, quiet book. The points it makes about old age are not especially original and not especially dazzling—and almost never made in our youth-obsessed culture, which alone would be reason enough to take the book seriously, except that there is so much more to it. A. G. Mojtabai does not merely sympathize with old age; she grants it the far more valuable gifts of dignity, respect and understanding. Autumn is a small work of art.