Books in Brief: How to Retire at 41

How to Retire at 41, by L. Rust Hills (Doubleday, 247 pp., $6.95).

L. Rust Hills is smart about everything that counts, like how to do four dumb tricks with a package of Camels, how to cut down on smoking and drinking quite so much, and how to know whether to get up and fix the way the television picture is rolling or wait and see if it fixes itself—all of which were chapter titles in his first book, How to Do Things Right. In that volume, Hills let loose a dominant, not particularly lovable persona called the Fussy Man, and now How to Retire at 41, the second entry in what will be the three-volume Fussy Man trilogy, has made its appearance. Thank God. We need all the Rust Hills advice we can get. What How to Retire at 41 doesn’t do is chart the way to what used to be called independence: “I discount this money business more or less entirely,” Hills allows. “If you really wanted to quit work, you could do it tomorrow—you know you could.” What it does do is live up to its subtitle: Dropping Out of the Rat Race without Going Down the Drain. Hills’s central concern is the challenge of living a life of satisfying leisure in a society that really doesn’t approve of idle 41-year-old men. Along the way, we get Hills’s brilliant common sense on the ways in which rich kids and poor kids grow up better prepared for creative hanging out than middle class kids; on why people become writers; on the ultimately fatal laws of social life in retirement; on money (“everyone always spends as much as he makes”); and on life in general (“it’s never easy, of course, to do anything really right”). Not that this book is all aphoristic charm. In the closing chapter, Hills and his several alter egos confront problems as painful in their own way as the gallstones that plagued Montaigne—whose thoughts, especially on retirement, illuminate this marvelous slim volume. One rejoices that the crowning glory of the series, How to Be Good, is promised for the near future.

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How to Retire at 41, by L. Rust Hills (Doubleday, 247 pp., $6.95).

L. Rust Hills is smart about everything that counts, like how to do four dumb tricks with a package of Camels, how to cut down on smoking and drinking quite so much, and how to know whether to get up and fix the way the television picture is rolling or wait and see if it fixes itself—all of which were chapter titles in his first book, How to Do Things Right. In that volume, Hills let loose a dominant, not particularly lovable persona called the Fussy Man, and now How to Retire at 41, the second entry in what will be the three-volume Fussy Man trilogy, has made its appearance. Thank God. We need all the Rust Hills advice we can get. What How to Retire at 41 doesn’t do is chart the way to what used to be called independence: “I discount this money business more or less entirely,” Hills allows. “If you really wanted to quit work, you could do it tomorrow—you know you could.” What it does do is live up to its subtitle: Dropping Out of the Rat Race without Going Down the Drain. Hills’s central concern is the challenge of living a life of satisfying leisure in a society that really doesn’t approve of idle 41-year-old men. Along the way, we get Hills’s brilliant common sense on the ways in which rich kids and poor kids grow up better prepared for creative hanging out than middle class kids; on why people become writers; on the ultimately fatal laws of social life in retirement; on money (“everyone always spends as much as he makes”); and on life in general (“it’s never easy, of course, to do anything really right”). Not that this book is all aphoristic charm. In the closing chapter, Hills and his several alter egos confront problems as painful in their own way as the gallstones that plagued Montaigne—whose thoughts, especially on retirement, illuminate this marvelous slim volume. One rejoices that the crowning glory of the series, How to Be Good, is promised for the near future.