Youth In Asia

Allen Tiffany’s Youth in Asia is a short story rather than a novel, and the title is a deliberate pun on euthanasia. The whole piece works in that direction, holding the wordplay just out of focus until the reader catches it.

The narrator is reflecting on his father, on aging, and on the kind of decisions families end up making about their elderly. The tone is observational, restrained, and slightly funny in a way that doesn’t undercut the seriousness of what’s being discussed.

Tiffany is a careful prose stylist. He doesn’t hand the reader his conclusions. The emotional work happens in the small details and in what isn’t said.

For readers who like short fiction in the lineage of George Saunders or Lorrie Moore, where humor sits next to grief without one canceling the other out, this is worth the short time it takes to read.