A critic once reacted to the comprehensiveness of the title of Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by asking, “Why write the book?” At the opposite end of the scale, the title of Richard B. Wright’s new novel is spare to the point of vagueness, and gives away nothing.

Once October begins, though, Wright gets specific. The narrative, which alternates between the Canadian homefront during the Second World War and present-day Europe, is spot-on in its evocation of time and place, as well as its insight into the motivations of its characters. In this understated story about youth and age, luck and mortality, Wright gets just about everything right, from first love to final breath.

We don’t always get to choose the people who will see us through our best or worst moments. Coincidence, or perhaps fate, reunites the book’s narrator, James Hillyer, with an old friend and nemesis at a crucial time in his life. James has flown from Toronto to England to be with his cancer-stricken daughter, Susan. No one knows the right thing to say in such circumstances, but James is particularly inept. A 74-year-old retired professor of Victorian literature, he is, by his own definition, “a drip,” a man better at analyzing his emotions than expressing them.

James understands this about himself, at least. Wright manages to make him seem petty and also poignantly human. So when his daughter first tells him, over the phone, about her bleak prognosis, he can’t help being upset that she told a friend first. He also can’t help being upset with himself for thinking this way:

“Our absurd vanities. Our desperate need to believe that we are always foremost in our children’s thoughts. And this helpless pandering to self-regard invades everything even at the worst moments in life.”

In London, James recognizes a man barking orders from a wheelchair outside a hotel. It turns out to be Gabriel Fontaine, whom he met six decades earlier and hasn’t thought much about since. But the memories of the summer they spent together as reluctant tourists and reluctant friends in a remote Quebec fishing village come rushing back. Back then, the two were teenagers and rivals for the affections of Odette Huard, a French-Canadian hotel chambermaid. Gabriel, a handsome, wealthy American crippled both physically and psychologically by polio, was “flamboyantly full of himself,” arrogant, and reckless. James was reserved and inexperienced and yet remarkably judgmental, full of both self-pity and self-importance. In other words, neither man has changed.

Gabriel’s mostly successful pursuit of Odette showed James a world where sex was, incredibly, a possibility. Some 60 years later, Gabriel is off on a last adventure and determined to take James along, once again as companion and witness. He’s dying and on his way to end his life in Zurich, where assisted suicide is legal and attracting a whole new demographic: “death tourists.”

October is Wright’s 11th novel and his second since his 2001 breakthrough with Clara Callan, which won both the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award. If the critical and commercial success of Clara Callan was a surprise, it was only because Wright was simply doing what he had done in all his previous fiction: chronicling those moments when ordinary lives collide with extraordinary events.

This is the stuff of October, too. “Rites of passage and all that bull,” as someone in the novel calls it. But that’s Wright’s inside joke. He is just as preoccupied as ever with exploring how the everyday survives, even outlasts, “the great public drama.” He’s also confident enough in his storytelling ability to let his readers do their share of the work. October is subtle without being skimpy or evasive. James, for instance, isn’t exactly an unreliable narrator, but there’s as much to learn from what he can’t quite bring himself to say as from what he does tell us.

It’s no coincidence, either, that the three main characters – James, Odette, and Gabriel – are English-Canadian, French-Canadian, and American, respectively. There’s a good deal of commentary on our national characteristics dramatized in their behaviour and interactions. To his credit, Wright never spells this out.

The novel’s title, too, begins to resonate as the narrative unfolds. The wisdom in October is hard-earned. It’s about change and how it happens incrementally, sometimes imperceptibly, like the shifting of the seasons. Like the seasons, too, there’s an appropriate time for everything. Summer is for making youthful, hopeful mistakes; autumn for reflecting on those mistakes, occasionally accepting them, and, just as often, regretting them.