Mosby has set her book in the years leading up to the Second World War — though a reader could be forgiven, particularly in the novel’s early pages, for conjuring images of Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age — a time of seismic changes all around: Brave choices often came at a steep price, and cowardly ones at an even steeper one.

Lavinia makes a few of each. Engaged to marry a suitable young man whom she admires but, alas, does not truly love, she meets up with a brazen former suffragist who challenges her to follow her heart. Naturally, Lavinia’s heart tells her to ditch the young man, bringing shame on herself and her family and necessitating a move from New York to Paris, away from everyone and everything she has ever known.

There, in the City of Light, Lavinia finds freedom. Freedom to venture out of her social class. Freedom to smoke in public. Freedom to carry on affairs with men just for the fun of it. Freedom to set up house for herself, on her own terms, to adopt a pet, to get a job. Freedom to fall in love with an altogether unsuitable sort of man and to discover her own beauty, to tap into her own desire and, ultimately, to uncover her own capacity for compassion and humanity.

We’re held captive by every bit of it. Mosby sweeps us into Lavinia’s world and holds us there, moving the action along at a brisk clip, shuttling us inexorably toward Lavinia’s deeper understanding of herself and the unsettled, unsettling circumstances that surround her, but pausing here to bask in the scent of a cologne or a cup of coffee or the thrill of an accidental touch of skin, and there to linger on the language of a seduction in its twilight. Indeed, Mosby fills entire pages with missives sent between Lavinia and her paramour, love letters in which they report the quotidian details of their lives and increasingly bare their souls to each other, and in which they flirt and fight and make up.

“Dearest Gaston,” Lavinia writes, in one typical example. “It has just started to snow. I can deny you nothing when it snows. It’s so beautiful right now I can almost forget all the ways I will regret this later. I accept your invitation [to meet] but you must promise to never ever correct my French grammar again, especially irregular verbs. Especially when I am naked. Stick to pronunciation if you feel compelled to improve the way I use your language. I’m sorry I threw the gold bangle bracelets at you but don’t ever call me a noisy woman again because I’m not. I hate this fighting.”

Sure, Mosby employs an old-fashioned device to tell the story of an old-fashioned sort of romance, but “Twilight” never slips into the tired terrain of the cliché. The lovely language and lively characters keep it fresh. One feels, instead, as if one has been given a new classic to enjoy — albeit a particularly light and almost startlingly simple one (as Lavinia’s acquaintances are carted off to their fate by the occupying Nazi forces, Lavinia barely notices, so consumed is she with the minutiae of love) — with a glistening modern-day veneer of feminism baked onto its surface.

Lavinia’s story is one woman’s tale of awakening, and of learning to care not just about and for herself but to care for others as well. Her journey, set in motion by a woman and propelled by a series of men, is completed, unexpectedly, with the help of another woman, whose companionship and love she discovers when she is bereft of all else. After all, as a famous person who was not Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Read more of our reviews of this month’s best fiction.

Grunwald has macular degeneration, a disease of the retina that affects 15 million Americans. Grunwald’s book describes how, back in 1992, he experienced the onset of macular degeneration — he poured water into a nonexistent glass he believed he “saw” on the table. As the years passed, his vision degenerated into a soft blur. Now, he often sees only indistinguishable shapes of light and color. Eye surgery has postponed the loss of his sight, but there is no cure for the disease.

As for the computer chip that Stevie Wonder is reportedly considering having implanted in his eyes, the “intraocular retinal prosthesis” is not advanced enough to give anything but partial sight. If Wonder has the operation, he probably will not be able to see any more clearly than Grunwald.

Blindness is grim stuff, but “Twilight” is much more than a sickbed memoir. Grunwald reports on the tensions between groups representing the totally blind and the partially blind. He also goes into the history of blindness — from the eyes painted inside Greek coffins to the various ancient practices of cutting off the noses of bungling eye surgeons. Grunwald also writes of his vision’s exile to memory and his struggles to view art and motion pictures. There are many lovely meditations on the concept of sight itself.

There is a great comic scene in a Paris boutique during the time Grunwald is losing his sight. He wanders, Mr. Magoo-like, into an occupied dressing room where a woman is undressing. He apologizes. Hurries out. Later, Grunwald learns that the blurry female shape was Catherine Deneuve.

The following interview was scheduled to take place in Grunwald’s New York office, but instead was rescheduled to take place over the phone.

After I read your book, I didn’t want to interview you in person because I didn’t want the advantage of being able to see you clearer than you could see me. Does that make sense?

[Grunwald speaks in a slight Viennese accent.] That’s sensitive, but I wouldn’t worry about it.

Do you still make associates uncomfortable with your partial sight? [He writes about this experience in his book.]

I hope not. A hell of a lot of people I meet socially don’t even know that I have any problem. We have a reasonably normal conversation. When it gets to the point where one would normally make eye contact, then they realize and I tell them about it. Does that make them uncomfortable? I don’t think so.

Because I appreciate irony so much, the best part of your book for me was when you walked in on Catherine Deneuve.

Yes. That certainly was ironic.

The one time God grants you this vision —

Damn right. Yes.

There’s very little anger about your situation in your writing. Did you decide to take anger out as a literary device?

This is not a literary device, I assure you. I am not in general an angry person. I dislike getting angry. I think getting angry hurts the person getting angry. Sure I get angry and frustrated, but basically I do not have an angry nature. As a mater of fact if I wanted to write a literary book more anger might have been more effective as a piece of writing, but I was trying to be truthful to how I actually feel.

Not to digress with my personal story, but after an automobile accident, I was laid up in the hospital with partial amnesia. I couldn’t remember the house where I lived. One day I asked a nurse, “Can this loss be permanent?” She was just this flighty kid and she chirped, “It sure could!” I was so pissed at her cheerfulness that I instantly remembered the house where I lived.

That’s a wonderful story. I hope you’ve written it down.

I read “Twilight” as a literary book. Who were your intended readers?

Two kinds. Obviously I was first hoping for readers who are themselves suffering from macular degeneration, but can still read or have it read to them. Also people who are related to others with the disease. There are tremendous numbers of them. Constantly people come up to me and say, “I have an aunt …” “I have an uncle …” “I have a grandfather who suffers.” So the book is written for those people. But I was hoping that the book would also be written for people not directly connected with this disease, but to whom I could say something about the experience of suddenly facing a handicap. Almost everyone comes up against some sort of limits sooner or later, and the need to make adjustment.

Where does medicine stand with the disease?

Well, I don’t know anything about the computer chip that will be put in Stevie Wonder’s eyes. The very latest development that I know about is a thing called photo-dynamic therapy. It involves injecting fluid into the veins and activating that fluid with a laser. The laser that they use for this is not the conventional laser which can destroy more than it heals. This new laser activates the fluid inside the eye with the belief that it closes the leaking cells that cause the disease. I believe this system is about to be approved, and will be tried on patients. They’re quite excited about it. They’ve also tried many different chemicals including interferon and even thalidomide to stop the disease. There’s also a theory that the right kind of vegetables are good preventive –

Mom saying, “Eat your carrots!”

Right! But again there is no proof that this really works.

Macular degeneration can strike at any age, right?

It can strike at any age. I believe there are a few cases of relatively young people that have it, but mostly it strikes older people, which is why it’s formally known as age-related macular degeneration. It usually strikes people over 50 and 60 and beyond.

I don’t quite know how to say this. I’m 41 —

Congratulations.

Aging is hell, isn’t it?

Ha! It’s no fun. That’s absolutely right. As someone once said, “Old age is not for sissies.” I don’t know who said that, but Charles de Gaulle said, “Old age is a shipwreck.” I must say I don’t like getting old, but so far I’m not quite a wreck.

How acute is the conflict between low-vision people and the blind?

I have not run into it personally, but I’ve talked to a lot of people in and around the Lighthouse [for the Blind] for instance who have told me about it, so what I say about the conflict is more reporting than personal. I have not run into a blind person who said, “How dare you make such a fuss!” Frankly, I expect to meet someone like that. But have not done so.

This is a cynical question: Who makes money from blindness? Who loses money if blindness is cured?

I don’t really see anybody who would have anything to gain from keeping the sightless blind. If you really wanted to be cynical, you’d say institutions like the Lighthouse or other charity institutions that help the blind would go out of business if you suddenly had a cure. I don’t think this is a real factor. Most people that I’ve run across in this work are generally dedicated to trying to help or alleviate blindness.

Is there a guru of sight-related diseases?

I don’t think there is a single guru, but there are many institutions that are working on this. Johns Hopkins is doing excellent work. The Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary as well.

Have you had any insurance problems dealing with macular degeneration?

Since I’m over 65, I’m on Medicare and I’ve had excellent health care. Personally I think Medicare should be changed so those who can afford to pay more, do. That’s a whole different philosophic answer to your question. Occasionally when I came across a practice that wasn’t covered by insurance, I’ve fortunately been able to cover it.

Do you still use an electronic text reader?

I have two of those. They work reasonably well. But they do try one’s patience. You have to feed them page by page and it’s slightly complicated to scan material. Also the synthetic voice that comes back simply misses several words.

There’s a lot of room for the technology to improve.

There certainly is. There’s voice-recognition software even now where you can dictate to a machine and it comes back out in print.

In your book you talk about not being able to skim audio books on cassette like you can text on the page. The tape recorder that I use to transcribe interviews allows me to speed up the tape while it’s still playing so I have a sense of what I’m skipping.

I have one of those too, but I haven’t learned the trick of listening to very fast speed. When you skim a printed book you can tell what you’re missing, but when you fast forward a tape you have to listen to a very distorted voice. I know there are those who can listen to what sounds like gibberish to most people and understand it. I have not been able to master that.

So what’s your next book?

My next book is gong to be a historical novel which is based on an episode in 16th century France about two women, one who is a fake saint.

The tradition of the blind storyteller goes back to Homer.

And extends to Aldous Huxley and Borges. [Pause.] Not that I’m comparing myself!

I love the passages in your book about the beauty in women’s faces or when you talk about painting. This question may be in bad taste, but do you think blindness has made you a better writer?

That’s certainly not a bad-taste question. That’s a good question. I think not. I don’t know that I’m a better writer today than I was 10 years ago. Obviously through this disease I’ve had experience and certain reflections which by definition I did not have before. Maybe there is a difference — a very old friend of mine commented on this book by saying that she thought it was much more personal and revealing of myself than the autobiography I published several years ago. So in that sense perhaps my writing has changed.

Newman must have recognized that, and in the roles of the late ’70s and early ’80s, he found a way out. It’s easy to look at those performances as the finest vintage of a dependable old pro. I’d argue that they are as exploratory and revelatory and, in their most daring moments, as naked as the work of Sean Penn, Robert Downey Jr. and Nicolas Cage, the finest actors of their generation.

Newman, who was born in Cleveland in 1925, began acting during his years at Ohio’s Kenyon College, where he enrolled after serving in the Navy Air Corps in World War II. From Kenyon, he moved on to the Yale Drama School and then, like many of the other great actors who emerged in the ’60s, to New York’s Actors Studio. He appeared in the 1953 Broadway production of William Inge’s “Picnic,” but he was lucky enough to begin his career as a working actor at a time when live television drama (on shows like “Playhouse 90″) enlarged the job market for New York actors beyond the stage. His first movie role came in 1955 with “The Silver Chalice,” a biblical epic so disastrous that years later, when it ran on TV in New York, Newman took out newspaper ads asking people not to watch it.

Newman found more prototypical Method roles as boxer Rocky Graziano in the biopic “Somebody Up There Likes Me” and as Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn’s “psychological” western “The Left-Handed Gun.” But unlike Marlon Brando or Montgomery Clift or James Dean, Newman has never seemed to be drawing on a well of neuroses. Comparing Newman to some of the other actors who came out of the Actors Studio, Pauline Kael once wrote, “They can do desperately troubled psychological states … but they’re so inward you can’t see them getting through a competently managed average day.” Arriving in the movies at a time when movie stars were starting to sweat off a little of the polish the studios had applied to them, Newman combined a more grounded version of the earthier, edgier style that had been making inroads into mainstream acting with the sex appeal that has always defined movie stars.

Newman was lucky enough not just to be blessed with a trim, athletic build (which he has kept) and incredibly bright blue eyes, but to have the charisma to back them up. When someone looks like Paul Newman, audiences are eager to like him. And they did, even when he played bastards — like the pool shark Fast Eddie Felson in “The Hustler” (the role he’d return to in “The Color of Money”); the drinking, rutting cattle hand in Martin Ritt’s hypocritically entertaining “Hud”; and the barn burner in Ritt’s deluxe Southern soaper “The Long, Hot Summer,” made in 1958, the same year in which Newman married his co-star, Joanne Woodward. Newman is called on to do some rotten things in these roles — slapping around Piper Laurie in “The Hustler” and nearly raping Patricia Neal in “Hud.” We’re not expected to like him in those moments, and that’s why they’re miscalculations. Who doesn’t want to like Paul Newman? He’s one of those actors with such instinctive audience rapport that he gets you on his side, seemingly without even trying.

Part of what’s so sexy about the young Paul Newman is that he often seems content to take his own sweet time. At the beginning of “The Long, Hot Summer,” when a court convened in a Mississippi general store advises him to get out of town before sundown, he takes a good, long insolent look at his assembled accusers before sauntering out of the place. Not even the thought of a rope around his neck is going to accelerate his steps a bit. You see the same thing in his entrance in “Hud,” coming out of a married woman’s house at 6 in the morning, pulling on his cowboy boots casually, not even rushing when the woman’s husband drives up. The young Newman often seems to be smirking, or on the verge of it. Sometimes his only response to someone’s deprecating remark is a clicking noise (like the one Marcello Mastroianni makes throughout “Divorce Italian Style”), the equivalent of asking sarcastically, “Well, whaddya know about that?” Newman’s characters are convinced that nobody around them is as fast or as clever as they are, and they’re never particularly good at hiding their contempt. (That’s what makes his scenes with Orson Welles in “The Long Hot Summer” such a delight — the barnburner Ben Quick treats this rich Southern patriarch as the scoundrel he himself aims to become, seeing through Welles and paying him his due at the same time.)

But Newman’s deliberate movements often betray a compressed energy that gives off a whiff of danger. Think of the way he aims his Cadillac convertible like a bullet down the dusty Texas roads of “Hud,” or the anger and frustration that’s released whenever he sends the pool balls whacking into each other in “The Hustler,” or the defiant speed with which he completes a task in “Cool Hand Luke,” determined to show the Southern chain-gang guards he’s up to anything they can dish out. None of this ever seemed like a hotshot young actor’s showing off. Newman was cocky, but he wasn’t boastful. The sarcasm his characters were steeped in struck a chord with movie audiences the way Humphrey Bogart’s — the movies’ sane, grounded antihero of an earlier era — did. Newman was the guy we could identify with as he refused to take the crap the world kept telling him he should feel grateful to be offered.

Newman’s biggest hits, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Sting” (1973) both of them directed by George Roy Hill and both of them stinkers, gave a hint of how Newman’s cockiness might have become schtick. Because the roles are little more than winks and smiles directed at his co-star, Robert Redford, Newman couldn’t bring them the conviction he managed for 1967′s “Cool Hand Luke,” an equally phony movie that was also a big hit. But Newman was diversifying his activities beyond acting. In 1968, he made his debut as a director with the acclaimed (but not very good) “Rachel, Rachel,” which earned Woodward an Academy Award nomination. He would continue directing, usually with Woodward starring, with “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” (1972) and a 1987 film of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” Newman shared producing chores on many of his films from the late ’60s and early ’70s. One of them, “Winning” in 1969, started him on his passion for race-car driving. Politics was a passion long before that; he and Woodward were two of Hollywood’s most visible liberals. (In the mid-’70s he was appointed by Jimmy Carter to be a delegate to a United Nations conference on disarmament.) Newman has concentrated on philanthropy during the ’80s and ’90s, raising millions of dollars from his Newman’s Own brand of products. Much of that money has gone to the camp Newman and Woodward founded for terminally ill children, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and to the Scott Newman Foundation, named after the son from his first marriage whose drug and alcohol problems led to his death in 1978.

Newman might have chosen to concentrate on politics or philanthropy, or even race-car driving, making only the occasional movie, coasting on his persona. In “Method Actors,” an essential book on American acting, critic Steve Vineberg quotes a 1975 interview where the actor said: “I’m falling back on successful things that you can get away with. I duplicate things now. I don’t work as compactly as I used to work, simply because the demands aren’t asked of me anymore.” The demand came, unexpectedly enough, in yet another Hill film, the 1977 hockey comedy “Slap Shot.” Instead of working on the crude, bash-’em-up level of Nancy Dowd’s script, Newman, then 52, chose to burrow right past the shallow material. You can see traces of his early characters in Reggie Dunlap, the aging player-coach of a third-rate, bush-league hockey team. He’s the sort of guy who never imagined there could be more to life than another game, another woman, another round of cold ones with the boys. Newman plays Reggie as something of an innocent, an adolescent sensualist in the body of a middle-aged man. He doesn’t make excuses for the man or condescend to his limits. And he manages to suggest the sadness of the character, on whom it’s beginning to dawn that he’ll have nothing left when his playing career is over.

Newman was often good in the most demanding emotional moments of his early movies — the way his body slumps when he sees Piper Laurie after she commits suicide in “The Hustler,” or the hymn he picks out on his banjo after receiving news of his mother’s death in “Cool Hand Luke.” But they didn’t hurt to watch, the way the greatest moments in his recent performances do. In “Fort Apache, the Bronx,” as Murphy, the decent cop trying simply to do the best he can in an impossible job, Newman ends a tense hostage situation in a hospital only to stumble upon the body of the nurse he’s dating (Rachel Ticotin), OD’d on heroin. Lovingly, refusing to believe what he sees, Murphy picks up his lover’s corpse and walks it up and down the hospital corridor in a futile attempt to revive her. Seeing an actor as stable as Paul Newman express that kind of desperation carries a deep sting. The scene is one of those awful incandescent moments our greatest actors are capable of: Newman conveys exactly what it is to watch the life and will go out of someone.

Cockiness doesn’t usually sit well on an older man. Newman must have known that. In his later roles his youthful bravado is replaced by the easy sureness of men who — not easily — have learned just who they are. Newman digs into the emotional makeup of his characters, even when they try to keep their emotions to themselves. You can see that most dramatically in his return to the role of Fast Eddie Felson in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 sequel to “The Hustler,” “The Color of Money,” for which Newman won an Academy Award. But it’s as Michael Gallagher in “Absence of Malice” (1981) that Newman goes deepest into the ways an ordinary man tries to hold onto his dignity. Gallagher’s reputation, livelihood and, most tragically, his closest friend are destroyed by a newspaper report suggesting he’s suspected in a labor leader’s disappearance. Newman is playing a man who doesn’t like to be the focus of attention, and his performance has a stunningly compact physicality. His younger characters insisted on living life the way they wanted; this performance is about what Gallagher does when that choice is taken away from him. Newman is so sure-footed in this performance that nothing he does to get his life back seems extraneous or excessive, including — in the film’s most shocking scene — roughing up the reporter (Sally Field) whose stories result in his best friend’s suicide. His blunt cruelty (far more mental than physical) seems the only thing that can get past Field’s inane journalism-school justification. Newman plays the aftermath of the scene with a spent disgust — at Field, at himself — and an incomprehension of the depth of his grief. That’s what you hear when he asks Field, “Didn’t you like her? Couldn’t you just stop scribbling and put down your goddamn ballpoint and look at her?”

Newman’s recent performances have included both unlikely roles (the repressed middle-class businessman in “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge,” perhaps the subtlest, most interior performance he’s ever given) and demonstrations of his continuing star power (the private detective in the ignored and surprisingly tender noir “Twilight”). A few weeks ago, on “Today,” he said that he’d like to find one more good role and then move on to other interests. And if the best he’s offered is the old-codger part he has in the current “Message in a Bottle” (a part he does his damnedest to dry out), who can blame him?

But it’s one of the least characteristic performances he’s given over the last 20 years, that of Louisiana Gov. Earl Long in Ron Shelton’s underrated and hugely enjoyable “Blaze” (1989) in which he seems to come full circle, combining the young actor’s flamboyant love of performing with the veteran’s ability to live inside the character. Newman’s Uncle Earl, with a shock of white hair, his profile more hawklike than it has ever been, and speaking in a low raspy voice, looks nothing like the doughy Southern pol gracing the cover of A.J. Liebling’s classic “The Earl of Louisiana.” But Shelton must have sensed the fit between actor and role. The film follows Long’s last years, his love affair with stripper Blaze Starr (Lolita Davidovich), which, along with the stand he took in favor of desegregation, cost him the governor’s mansion, and his bittersweet vindication by being elected to Congress hours before he died of a heart attack.

Long was one of the great benevolent rogues politics give rise to (like LBJ or Boston’s legendary Mayor James Michael Curley), a man who reveled in the impurity of politics and played it as a game at which he could beat any piker fool enough to challenge him. Newman plays Long as a randy little bantam, and it’s politics as much as sex that gets him raring to go. The gleam in Newman’s eye throughout the movie might have been put there by the sight of his luscious Blaze, or by some scheme he’s hatching to smite his enemies. Like the crawfish etouffee he brings in a steaming pot to an elegantly laid table, the pleasures Earl enjoys are best when they’re thrown together, letting their juices mix. But Newman is so deep inside the character that there also seems to be a cloud perpetually hovering over him, forever threatening to sweep him into his most private thoughts. Newman gets at the wonderful contradiction and tragedy of this master politician: how a shrewd man allows himself to be carried away by his passions — Blaze and politics. There’s a sadness that lies in wait at the end of Newman’s performance, the sadness of seeing something grand and magnificent pass out of this life. Newman goes bone deep into Earl’s profound distress at having to let go of politics, the thing he loves best, before he’s accomplished everything he wants.

Thankfully, the riches of Newman’s own career don’t allow for any such disappointment.

A collaboration between Benton and novelist Richard Russo (whose book “Nobody’s Fool” was the basis for Benton’s last movie), the screenplay uses a detective story as a pretext for a film about aging and death. That’s a sure way to invite the sentimentality that lurks beneath nearly every hard-boiled exterior; but when you’re watching Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon engage in fond old-acquaintance backchat, or Newman and James Garner talking about what became of former cohorts, you remember how satisfying that sentimentality can be when it’s held in check by an actor’s intelligence.

Newman plays Harry Ross, a retired private eye who’s become a permanent house guest at the home of two old friends, movie stars Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Sarandon). A few years earlier, when their daughter Mel (Reese Witherspoon) ran off to Mexico with a boyfriend, Harry tracked her down and brought her home. But he got himself accidentally shot in the process and went into a boozing tailspin. Sober now, he’s asked to do just enough so that everyone can pretend he’s not living on the Ameses’ charity. The plot hinges on a blackmail threat, the murder of a retired cop who may have been behind it and the never-solved disappearance of Catherine’s first husband. Really, though, it’s no more than an excuse for Benton to give his actors a series of extended scenes.

“Twilight” hums with the pleasure the actors take in their work. Time and again, they come up with gestures or line readings that seem to contain the entirety of their characters. For Witherspoon, who’s able to show the vulnerable side of a hard-edged kid without going soft, it’s the little heartbreaker of a moment after she’s made love with her boyfriend and asks him, “Do you love me? It’s OK if you don’t.” And later, when she asks Harry point blank if he’s in love with her mother and then assesses what awaits him with a pitiless “Poor you.” For Stockard Channing, as Harry’s old police partner, Verna, it’s the embrace she gives Harry when she comes upon him unexpectedly at a murder scene followed by the brusque instruction to an officer: “Cuff him.” For Liev Schreiber, as Mel’s former boyfriend, it’s the callowness that makes him a born patsy. For Garner’s old buddy Ray, it’s the suggestion of sneakiness beneath his usual relaxed ease. And for Margo Martindale, who, as one of the blackmailers, is in a great tradition of tough, wisecracking movie broads, it’s the rueful weight she puts on her final line, “I never learn.” It’s a moment of classic noir futility, as devastating as the question at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Killing”: “What’s the use?”