The other day, I finished Jonathan Raban’s lovely new book, “Father and Son.”

It was his final one. Raban died in January at age 80.

He was a writer’s writer, a novelist, an essayist, a book reviewer … and a travel writer.

He didn’t much care for the last designation, even though his travel books earned him the widest acclaim. He thought it too limited a description of what he did and what those books were—deep, personal dives into places and experiences, less guidebooks than literary explorations of the way landscape and culture shape us.

Raban wrote with an honest wryness, unafraid to present himself as foolish or unlikable. He cast an uncompromising eye on the cruelties and folly of which human beings are capable, without sparing himself from such scrutiny.

That is what gave his writing its poignance and power.

I first read him more than 40 years ago, when I picked up a copy of the book that established his reputation, “Old Glory: An American Voyage.” It is the story of Raban’s journey down the Mississippi River in a small boat, a trek that reveals both those parts of America that are eternal and those that are ever-changing.

An Englishman, Raban grew up fascinated by Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and the mighty Mississippi. When he came to voyage down the river, he was in his late 30s, traveling through a late 1970s America riven by the Vietnam War, the fall of a disgraced president, economic upheaval and cultural tensions.

He viewed this nation—our nation—as it tried to stumble its way forward with an outsider’s penetrating gaze, respectful but unblinking. Not much got by him.

When I bought “Old Glory” all those years ago, I was looking for a diversion. I was attending graduate school in St. Louis at the time. The romance of the big river beguiled me.

Raban’s book, though, was a revelation.

It taught me different ways to travel, to seek out and see the ways the places where people live mold the contours of their lives. It taught me to linger and to listen, to wait for communities and people to reveal themselves.

But Raban also showed me the inherent and intimate value of writing—of the ways stringing words together helped one sort through complicated moments and make sense of the often-mystifying life around us.

That’s what this, his last book, does.

It is a memoir that runs on two tracks.

One navigates Raban’s rehabilitation from a devastating stroke a dozen years ago, and his struggle to discover how much of his life and capacity would remain after he was afflicted. The other traces his father’s days in the service in World War II, which coincided with the elder Raban’s courtship and marriage to his wife—and the birth and early years of the writer-to-be.

At first, these two narratives—one epic in scope, the other as personal as a trip to the bathroom—seem an odd match.

But then the connection becomes clear.

These are stories of two men, linked by blood, confronting forces larger than they are, trying to find a way back to a life each covets. It is a book both about holding on and about letting go, about loving life and realizing that it must and will end.

Life’s stream has carried me a long way since I first plucked Raban’s “Old Glory” from a shelf. The bookstore where I bought it no longer exists, part of the process by which the world remodels and reinvents itself again and again.

Much of observing time ramble forward I have found satisfying. With all its joys and sorrows, life is an endlessly illuminating experience.

But one part of it I never expected to be as disquieting as it is—that of saying farewell to writers who have meant something to me.

I’ve read most of Raban’s books, many of them as soon as they were published and always with satisfaction. I never sought out a chance to meet him, even though we had friends in common.

I’m not sure why. Maybe I thought there would always be time. Maybe I preferred just to know him in print.

His last book makes clear that even though good books endure, those who write them do not.

As goodbyes go, Jonathan Raban’s is one of the most elegant I’ve read.