The Young, the Old, the Now and the Gone

“All the old kindnesses are gone,” says Clyde Brind’amour, 48, the main character in a short story from Richard Cumyn’s latest collection, The Young in Their Country: And Other Stories. Sarah Selecky’s Richard, who is 30-something in This Cake Is for the Party, says that “the now is so thin. There’s just not much now to go around, is there? As soon as you grasp it, it’s gone.” These new books from the veteran Cumyn and the relative newcomer Selecky present a number of similar relationships between the young, the old, the now and the gone.

Aging, loss, the difficulty of living in the moment: serious concerns, although both of the previous quotations are funny in context. Clyde’s lament is ironic because he is a Peter Pan who scorns his elders as “geezers,” and Richard jokes that he is giving up “the now” for the “much more satisfying” concept of then. But a...