A Curious Earth by Gerard Woodward (Norton, $14.95 trade paper original, 9780393330977/0393330974, March 2008)

Aldous Jones is not only aging rapidly, he's in serious mental decline. Mourning the death of his wife, Colette, over a year earlier, he sits in his kitchen, warmed by the cooker's gas jets, staring at a cupboard that has potatoes growing out of it, and wearing her watch on his left arm, "a gentle grip on his wrist, a counterbalance to the weight of his loneliness." And he drinks. His daughter, Juliette, encourages him to paint; a retired art teacher, he's always painted, but now with time and talent in abundance, he's unmotivated. However, one day he visits the National Gallery, becomes entranced by Rembrandt's portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels and decides to start painting again. In the process, he experiences odd time distortions, eventually collapses in his kitchen and winds up in a hospital, victim of blood loss from a bleeding ulcer. Thus begins Aldous' odyssey into art and aging; like all voyagers, he meets some pretty wacky characters on his journey.

His son, Julian, lives in the Belgian town of Ostend, and is writing a novel about the end of the world and lots of poems about sand. Julian's houseguest, author and sexologist Hermann Lorre, claims to have had sex with Hitler. Black and beautiful erotic artist Agnès Florizoone seduces Aldous. Back in London, the secretive and ingenuous Maria asks Aldous to teach her about art. Julian's other son, James, an anthropologist, brings his Amazonian wife and son home to live with Aldous, where misunderstandings ensue when she and her son tie up a neighbor's cat for bow-and-arrow practice. His life fills with people and he falls in love, but while often hilarious, A Curious Earth has an underlying sadness at the deterioration that aging and the drinking life bring. But Aldous now pursues life and a new-found goal suggested by Maria with brio and determination.

This is a book that one reads for the pleasure of the story and for the pleasure of perfect sentences, of spot-on descriptions. On Aldous cleaning his place for Maria's first visit: "he rode the wild beast of the Electrolux all around the house as it gave its one long shocked intake of breath." On Aldous' grief as openings he had crafted seem to slowly close: "A door slamming shut deep in his heart would sometimes wake him in the middle of the night, choking him with sadness . . . sometimes he woke from a pillow so tear-sodden it was as though he'd fallen asleep while the tide was coming in. Or the angel of dejection had visited, scattering her sad pearls." Of a buxom dentist: "She was a seaside postcard in want of a caption." Funny and poignant, A Curious Earth leaves you wanting more, and you can get it, since this is the last part of a trilogy. The first volume, August, will be published this summer, and the middle volume, I'll Go to Bed at Noon, is already out.--Marilyn Dahl