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The Last Cigarette: The Smoking Diaries Volume 3 by Simon Gray  

Gray has been saying that this is the last book. He regards himself, at 70, as a very, very old man - which he isn't, but he plainly feels like one, beset by bereavements, hating his teetotal condition and full of the self-disgust of age. At one point he muses on the difference in meaning between "shaming" and "shameful", and calls on "hating" and "hateful" to help him out. The choice is not insignificant. At the end of the book, he reports the discovery of a tumour on his lung (the goal of giving up smoking, of course, was never achieved). But if he wants to stop writing these diaries now, he has certainly earned the right. It seems to me that the triumph of these books is not in how a man redeems himself, but how a writer does. Gray used to write unashamedly old-fashioned plays; being remembered for them alone would of course have been sufficient. But whoever could have predicted that at the end of his career he would hit on such an artful, brilliant, personal and glitteringly postmodern way of - well - settling his own hash?

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