'Heroic Measures' by Jill Ciment

Given that Jill Ciment's "Heroic Measures" opens in the months following Sept. 11, it's hardly surprising that one of her geriatric heroines should find "the anxiety of being left alone in the apartment became too much for her . . . particularly as dusk fell and nocturnal shadows grew menacing, and her sense of loneliness and old age became inseparable." What is surprising -- like much in this brave, generous, nearly perfect novel -- is that this particular character, Dorothy, is a dachshund. And yet, Ciment manages to pull off this risky, sentiment-baiting maneuver, an accomplishment previously attained only by the likes of Tolstoy.

Of course, Ciment has made a career out of avoiding sentimentality. Over the course of nearly 25 years, she's produced an odd, iconoclastic body of fiction, with a short story writer's affinity for revealing almost metaphorical detail. Her three previous novels differ dramatically from one another -- a wry coming-of-age tale followed by a taut, cool thriller followed by a lyrical, faintly absurdist historical novel -- but all are unified by Ciment's cool remove from her oddball characters.

In "Heroic Measures," happily, Ciment veers in precisely the opposite direction, offering almost unbearably intimate access to the minds of Dorothy and her owners, Alex and Ruth Cohen, a pair of East Villagers in their 70s, whose Cold War-era activities earned them a 750-page FBI file that Alex, an artist of some renown, is turning into an illuminated manuscript. After years of near-poverty, the Cohens are sitting on a gold mine: Their fifth-floor walk-up, purchased 50 years earlier for $5,000, is now worth a million. Before the market bottoms out -- and they can no longer make it up those stairs -- they've decided to sell.

The novel takes place over three fraught days, beginning on the evening before their open house, as they vacillate between eager anticipation and anxiety about what the future holds for them, about what it means to be old in a city -- a country -- that prizes youth above all. "In the early light," Ruth thinks as she walks Dorothy, "the street looked tooled in silver, and she felt such tenderness for their neighborhood that she had to collect herself or she might start to cry: they were being wrenched away from everything they loved and knew just when their age demanded stability." A moment later, though, she chastises herself for acting like "a frightened old woman" and wonders, "Why is old age synonymous with stability? Old age is anything but stable."