Older Men treats in a very straightforward manner a very dysfunctional family. Elise's parents no longer love each other. Elise wishes they would get a divorce. Her father's relationship to her is overly close, so much so that her mother says to him in front of Elise, "All you don't do is go to bed with her. Do that! What difference would it make? It's just the final step.

Do that too!" As the story progresses, Elise realizes that her mother is right in insisting that there is something unhealthy about her relationship with Nate. She discovers that Nate had a similar relationship with his stepdaughter Kara; in fact, Kara says to Elise, "You're leading my life." At the end of the novel, Nate brings Suzanne Hausman, a psychiatrist in her thirties whom he is dating, to visit Elise at Yale. He also brings Suzanne's two...