Given the demographics of this website, you're probably in your 20s—I certainly am (remind me to revise this review in 2030).

I've have no first-hand experience with one's mind growing old and slow, of one's body gradually disintegrating, of one's flesh-and-blood friends all diminishing into fading memories.

In this novel, Johnson (best known for his "book in a box" The Unfortunates) makes a comedy of infirmity—hardly a typical humorous topic.

We follow 9 patients of a nursing room through the same set of experiences: dining, cleaning up, constructing items, jousting (don't ask). Each perspective is allocated 21 pages of stream of consciousness save that of House Mother, the de facto head of the geriatrics, who gets a whopping 22.

At the beginning of each chapter, we get some brief doctor's notes:

age - 74
marital status - widow
sight - 60%
hearing - 75%
touch - 70%
taste - 85%
smell - 50%
movement - 85%
CQ count - 10
pathology - contractures; incipient hallux valgus; osteo-arthritis; suspected late paraphrenia; among others.

That's the happiest description.

The closest novel I've read is probably Malone Dies but even that's a stretch. Like Malone, the writing is impeccable and absurd in the terrible brutality of the reality it depicts.