Some people age well. Alan Bennett, for instance, has gradually but inexorably ascended to national treasure status. Others age badly. Take Rudy Giuliani, whose meltdown on live television a couple of years ago took on an unedifyingly literal form, as hair dye trickled down his face. Still others don’t age at all. Arnold Schwarzenegger still looks like, in the words of Clive James, “a brown condom full of walnuts”.
More generally, ageing clearly has its challenges. But now there is a Korean runaway bestseller, ably and idiomatically translated into English, to help us make sense of it all. Rhee Kun Hoo, 89 and battling seven different health conditions, evidently knows a thing or two about his subject. And he writes with considerable empathy. A psychiatrist, he is “considered a visionary” at home for introducing open wards, doing away with straitjackets and solitary confinement.
On the face of it, then, Rhee is the perfect guide to help us navigate what Henry James called the rest that precedes the great rest, or what Rhee himself rather generously describes as “middle age”: the years between 65 and 79. Still, his simple counsels are oddly anticlimactic. Is there really a reader who needs to be told, post-pandemic, that “loneliness is the enemy of a joyful life”? Or that “parenting is quite the task, because there’s no manual”?
Much of the book is given over to trite reflections such as these. If you want a vague idea of the kind of ride you are in for, know that there are chapter titles such as “You Are, Quite Literally, a Living Miracle”. Rhee looses a cataract of vignettes, all of which end with essentially the same advice to the newly senescent: “you need to accept your life as is”. Later paraphrases include “relax and enjoy the process – it’s gonna be fun!” More practically, Rhee’s recommendations are new age-ily straightforward. We are told, for example, to give strangers the “gift” of a “face that beams with a compassionate smile”, followed by the instruction: “Reflect on this, dear reader.”
The only redeeming feature of this book for western readers is perhaps its cultural distance. We are spared the obligatory trot through Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man”, for example. Look past the empty homilies, though, and there’s a reflective account of a life lived in interesting times. In one of the more moving episodes, Rhee describes his belated appreciation of his father. Growing up, Rhee thought of him as a humourless disciplinarian, but only later learned his radical past as a student leader during the March 1st Movement of 1919, calling for the overthrow of Japanese imperial rule.
Likewise, he writes touchingly of his regret, as an army doctor, at authorising the conscription of a young man who was clearly “a serious patient”. At the time, Rhee had taken him to be a draft dodger feigning medical complications. It isn’t easy to make these kinds of admissions, and it is to Rhee’s credit that he does so without a trace of either preening or self-flagellation.
That said, his relentlessly upbeat tone will grate on some readers’ nerves. “Now is my golden age,” he writes. Early on, he tells us that his life “hasn’t exactly been plain sailing”, but we also learn that he lives in a four-storey villa in Gugi-dong, the South Kensington of Seoul. It’s a convenient address from which to rail against “money sickness syndrome”. Even a gerontophile such as myself can’t help but feel a twinge of resentment at the boomer complacency of it all. Rhee’s book may be a useful handbook for the current crop of comfortably off would-be centenarians, but I suspect it isn’t going to age well.
• If You Live to 100, You Might As Well Be Happy is published by Rider (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
