[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...