The Senior Show

By Ethan Cooper

The Senior Show begins with Emma and David Henley, 70 years old and basically healthy, walking on Broadway near their apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side. The date is April 11, 2015, and the Henleys are chatting about their pregnant daughter-in-law when Emma trips, falls, and, they learn later, fractures a vertebra in her spine. In contrast, The Senior Show, in its final and 45th chapter, limns the frazzled Henleys at a brunch in the Yale Club on November 18th, 2021. In the interim, Emma has had scores of falls and numerous seizures, as well as broken her left hip and undergone brain surgery. In this period, the Henleys have also made frequent visits to hospital emergency rooms while Emma, often escorted by David, had myriad appointments with doctors and physical therapists.

The Senior Show is the story of Emma's journey through a labyrinth of medical care where her emerging physical problems are eventually diagnosed and sometimes mitigated but never cured. As the Henleys cope with her many medical problems, Emma shows lots of mettle and fights to retain a full life. She also draws strength from her marriage, which is described as:

"Then, the basic rapport of the Henleys-similar interests, values, and intimate preferences-assumed primacy and Emma and David had thirty wonderful years together, when they were inseparable. At the end of the day, when they shared dinner and then a bedroom, they both felt, deeply and mutually, that there was no other person they would prefer as a partner. Their domesticity was happy and solid."

In counterpoint to Emma's medical travails, the Henleys in The Senior Show also attend annual mini reunions with David's Yale classmates the weekend of the Yale-Harvard football game. At these annual reunions, the Yalies, all in their seventies, discuss loss and aging. In doing so, several claim to find consolation in the philosophies of Proust, Nietzsche, Seneca, Dewey, and Baudelaire. But their variations on these philosophies are idiosyncratic and wryly humorous with one Yalie-the guy who never did the work but who graduated Phi Beta Kappa-radiating empathy, insight, and bar charisma.

The Senior Show, Ethan Cooper's seventh novel, is a mash-up of two genres. It is a medical thriller with Emma both a protagonist and victim as her mysterious prognosis gradually unfolds. And it is a quest novel, as the Henleys go from doctor to doctor-that is, from sage to sage-seeking enlightened advice for coping with Emma's complicated condition. The Senior Show is also a fast-moving and medically sophisticated narrative about the experience of aging, which, if we live long enough, eventually gets us all.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0D3LVHJX1
• ISBN13: 9798323109821
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"