From This Strange Eventful History, which will be published this month by W. W. Norton.

He could hear his wife, Barbara, now in the other room, getting ready for his father’s funeral. This day, another to be got through. So many sensations—were they emotions? He tried now not to register emotions, not simply in this period of his father’s final illness and now death, but in this stage of his life. He sometimes felt that getting older was like inhabiting a mansion you couldn’t afford, so that you were forced to shut down one room after another, eventually entire wings, until…