I, Hendrikus Gerardus Groen, am ever the civil, ingratiating, courteous, polite, and helpful guy. Not because I really am all those things, but because I don't have the balls to act differently. I rarely say what I want to say. I tend to choose the path of least confrontation. My specialty: wanting to please everybody. My parents showed foresight in naming me Hendrik: you can't get any blander than that. I'll wind up spiraling into depression, I thought. That's when I made the decision to give the world a little taste of the real Hendrik Groen. I hereby declare that in this diary I am going to give the world an uncensored exposé: a year in the life of the inmates of a care home in North Amsterdam.
So begins The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old, a fictional diary that records the thoughts and actions of the titular Hendrik Groen through a full calendar year at the House of the Setting Sun nursing home. From the reviews I've read and personal recommendations I've received, I expected a lighthearted and wry view of aging, but that's not really what I found here. By deciding to be “uncensored” for the first time in his life, Hendrik is often depressed, often critical, and often politically incorrect (even if, in this fictional diary, he mostly attributes these views to other characters); I felt for Hendrik, but I wasn't laughing. There was much to like in this book – the Dutch setting (the Amsterdam geography and political life), the group of seniors who decide to take care of one another and start living life to the fullest just as their nursing home is tightening its rules and budget, the sweet freedom Hendrik experiences by buying a mobility scooter and terrorising the sidewalks of Amsterdam – but it wasn't a feel good read (but then again, maybe I'm the real curmudgeon here).
I liked the idea that just writing about daily life as an “inmate” granted Hendrik the insight to start making positive changes in his own situation. He and his five closest friends create the Old But Not Dead Club, and every couple of weeks, one of them plan a surprise outing for the group – from bird-watching to a golf clinic – that always involve a private minibus and plenty of wine and croquettes. They become the envy of the other residents of the home – and suffer snark from the staff – and when any of them suffers a health setback, they rally together to give each other the personalised care that is lacking in a public institution. I didn't much care for the incessant quoting of newspaper headlines – some of this would have served to anchor the story in 2013, but every other entry made reference to the news (from what celebrity died, to the abdication of Queen Beatrix, to Dutch politicians and their budget cuts that might affect seniors) – and that felt like lazy writing. I understand that the Netherlands is a right-to-assisted-suicide state, but I found it depressing to read about so many seniors planning their deaths (and it was probably meant as deep political commentary to have the one character who might have most benefited from a suicide cocktail have their living will go missing and endure a lingering demise; just more depressing for this reader). I didn't much care for the storyline of the obligatory Alzheimer's sufferer: this sweet, self-deprecating, and self-aware decline isn't how the disease is progressing in my own family. And while we don't learn much of Hendrik's life before the home, the two big bombshells are the stuff of soap opera and made me feel uneasy when he starts to develop a crush on a new resident.
But what I really didn't like was the constant meanness: Is killing all the fish in the home's aquarium (three times) supposed to be funny? Hendrik privately complains about those residents excluded from the club (while constantly deriding them as “whiners”), the administration is made up of bullies and condescending self-servers (who turn down the thermostats to increase their own expense accounts), and so many of the residents say horrible things:
“Sweet dears they are – I'm not saying they're not – but I'd still rather have a Dutch nurse,” is the prevailing attitude. The older we are, the more reactionary. There are quite a few out-and-out racists walking around in here; the comments heard in the common room don't lie.Residents are satisfied that if there's a war in Syria, at least they're just bombing each other; it's supposed to be funny on an outing when one of the club orders their Chinese food in “fly-lye” pidgin; people wistfully remember the good old days of their youth (give or take the Nazis). Hendrik decides to try the home's exercise class one day, but won't go a second time because: “The ladies are truly past the point of shame, and it is not a pretty sight. Pink leggings hugging skinny, bony knees or fat, jiggling thighs, form-fitting T-shirts pulled tight across what were once a pair of breasts.” And if that doesn't strike one as inappropriate (will my body really not ceased to be judged in my nineties?), another member of the club – after declaring that he had spiked the ladies' coffee with female libido-enhancing pills and hoped to see them all in his room shortly – explains, “I have a lot of catching up to do because I was married for thirty years to a very sweet woman, but she was as cold as a chest freezer and as dry as a cookie.” (How old does a woman have to be before she can stop worry about being roofied?) Hendrik isn't impressed by what he reads in the newspaper about America either: remarking on war-mongering, their ballooning national debt, and gun culture:
Reading about cute American five-year-olds who on their birthdays are presented with their first pink gun, “My First Rifle”, complete with real bullets, made me wonder if in American nursing homes the oldies walk around packing My Last Rifles. With all the Parkinson's about, that would lead to quite a few accidents. I haven't heard of any such mass shootings, but I can't imagine there aren't at least some instances of old geezers shot point-blank by fellow residents protecting their God-given property – a piece of cake, for instance.Yuk yuk. Hendrik is a secret republican, a firm atheist, and as Christmas approaches, he makes the following defence of Holland's Black Pete tradition:
Do I take offence when a brown, yellow, or black person calls me pale-face, cheese-head, or skinflint? No. Would I be offended if Santa Claus were black and all his Petes were foolish, thin-lipped white helpers with exaggerated Amsterdam accents? No. Is that because my great-grandfather was never a slave but a factory worker slogging away sixty hours a week for a pittance? No.Everything is just anti-something. I might have forgiven the meanness if this book had actually been written by an eighty-something-year-old inmate of a nursing home. (The pseudonymous author has been outed as Peter de Smet, a 61-year-old librarian with no previous published written work.) So, while on the one hand I am completely open to an exposé about the apparent declining present-day treatment of the Dutch generation who survived Nazi occupation during World War II, I was immediately annoyed by the writing (the translation?) when on page 20 it says, “A Canta plowed full steam ahead” followed three pages later by “the council that keeps the roads ploughed”. More than anything: I wasn't impressed by the writing; with a year's worth of headlines and the scantest bit of imagination, anyone could have written this book.
And I should add the note that I do feel extra curmudgeonly for not liking this book much because of those who had personally recommended it to me: Janice is a coworker (a retired school teacher) who said she laughed through the whole thing, recognising so much of her eighty-something-year-old mother's attitudes in these pages. And the other recommendation came from my coworker John, a 71-year-old retired book store owner who is a wise and gentle man; someone who had astutely recommended to me before - just based on random conversations we were having - both The Professor and the Madman and Brunelleschi's Dome. I am delighted to follow up on any recommendations John gives me, but about a month ago he told me that he had seen the movie Last Vegas, and that if I was looking for a few laughs, I should check it out on Netflix. Within a couple of days, I was at home all day, my eyes were tired of reading, and I figured, "Why not?" What followed was one of the lamest, paint-by-numbers, unfunny movies I had ever seen. The next time I saw John, I told him that he and I had very different ideas of what constituted "funny": Viagra and poolside bikini contests don't make me chuckle; this was comedy for old people. He shrugged good-naturedly and said, "Consider the source of the recommendation."
So when he hand-presented me with a copy of Hendrik Groen and said, "I think you'd like this", I was cautious. I reminded him of the Last Vegas disaster, and he assured me it was funnier than that. I asked if it was as weirdly mean-spirited as The 100 Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared or as poorly written as The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules, and he promised me that it was not; he understood exactly what I meant by my complaints, and this book was not those books. And now I don't want to tell him that I think this book is mean-spirited and poorly written, or once again imply that maybe he liked it because he's old (which can't be a matter of light-hearted teasing too many times). And I want him to keep recommending books to me - the store's customers love John's recommendations; he is always the one they mention specifically - and ultimately, it makes me feel like: I may be younger by twenty years, but I'm definitely the curmudgeon here. Harumph.