The coming-of-age story is one of the most common for a novel, especially a first novel. Almost all writers of fiction draw on their own autobiographies to some extent, and everyone who is an adult has experienced coming of age in at least some capacity. It’s what makes so many of these books–J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye would be the classic example–perennial favorites. Everyone, writer or not, has experienced coming of age, growing older, transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Any reader can relate in some way to the move from a young point-of-view to a more seasoned one.
But recently a spate of novels has turned to mid-life rather than early life. Writing fiction is a career with a long training period. Many writers spend a decade, even two or three, writing work that then remains unpublished. So while the coming-of-age story is commonly told because everyone has one, the mid-life crisis story may be commonly told because so many writers begin publishing successfully as they reach that stage of life, or at least approach it. Middle age is also a time in a character’s life when he has a bit more control and a wider variety of options. This leaves more options open for the writer. the same basic theme, though, is apparent in both coming-of-age and mid-life novels: The question of what a life might mean and how it might be led in order to infuse it with the greatest significance possible.
The category of novels about men’s mid-life crises is particularly flourishing at the moment. There are plenty of stories of women’s crises at all ages as well, from Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s tale of a bored doctor’s wife originally published in 1857, to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteredge, about a disgruntled former schoolteacher in modern Maine. Indeed, there are so many such stories that they’re less of a novelty. Not that male mid-life crisis has never been examined before, but it’s approached now with a new openness and often sly humor.
All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well (2008) by Tod Wodicka
Take, for example, the eccentric protagonist of Tod Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. Burt Hecker stands at a crossroads at the age of 63. His wife, Kitty, has died, and he sells their upstate New York bed and breakfast (and home) and takes off for Germany. Burt is not without a more specific goal to his travel, however: He is on the road with a musical group that performs Medieval (a different kind of Middle Age) chants, and Burt himself is a reenactor of that period and keeps to the strict rules of the Confraternity of Times Lost Regained, which means he refuses to drive a car or wear modern clothing. (His nom de histoire is Eckbert Attquiet.)
Burt is also distanced from his adult children, and he takes the opportunity to meet up with one of them, Tristan, a jazz musician in Prague. Tristan and his sister, June, are strongly connected to their mother’s Lemko heritage. Their maternal grandmother, Anna Bibko, is deeply invested–Burt would say obsessed–with the tragedy of the Lemko past. While traveling in Europe, Burt also learns more about the history of the Lemkos.
As he travels, Burt experiences memories that help to explicate his past more completely. While he loved his wife, he doesn’t recall much about her death at the start of the novel, due to either depression over her demise or alcoholism induced by over-consuming home-brewed mead or both. Burt is not a likeable character in any traditional sense. Like many of these middle-aged narrators, he is a classic misanthrope. But, there is much poignant humor to be found in Burt’s restlessness and his inability to function in the modern world. Unlike a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist is finding his way toward adulthood, Burt is staring down the end of his life. His wife’s death has made him cognizant of his own mortality.
A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living (2008) by Michael Dahlie
Also teetering on the edge of his twilight years is Arthur Camden, the down-on-his-luck protagonist of Michael Dahlie’s funny, moving debut novel, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living. Nothing goes right for Arthur, who at the start of the novel has learned that his ex-wife is remarrying rather quickly. Arthur has also run his family’s import-export business into the ground, and while he’s escaped with enough money to live nicely on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side, he’s at loose ends. In the coup de grace, Arthur visits the fly-fishing clubhouse, where he has inherited membership through a long line of Camdens, with a female guest–which is verboten–and the two light a fire in the fireplace and promptly burn down the historic old building, making him an outcast among his fly-fishing companions.
Arthur escapes to his son’s ranch in Colorado, but that doesn’t do much for his mood. He then tries visiting an old friend in the French countryside, but the friend has not been forthcoming about his own situation in the midst of an ugly divorce. As a result, Arthur has a run-in with the French police and must again skip town, this time to avoid the real or imagined threat of being tossed into a French prison. He tries Nantucket, too, where a cousin with whom he has always competed shows up and makes Arthur feel bad about himself. In Manhattan he’s surrounded by people who pity him, at best, and in some cases outright dislike him.
Running through all of this is a vein of dark, poignant humor, most of which derives from Arthur’s own relationship with his now-dead father, who was just the competent, get-along-in-the-world type of man Arthur has aspired to be. Recurring in many titles about men in middle age is the realization that they are nowhere near as commanding as their fathers were at their age.
Billy Mernit’s Imagine Me and You also features a protagonist, Jordan, who has been dumped by his wife. Jordan, however, is driven so mad by his wife’s leaving him (Isabella, a native Italian, has returned to Italy) that rather than try to get over her by clumsily seeking female companionship as Arthur Camden does, he decides to invent a fake girlfriend to drive her back into his own arms with jealousy. This is natural for Jordan, who is a screenwriter and also teaches screenwriting, so he’s practiced at creating believable characters out of whole cloth. By following his own seven-step system for setting up a romantic comedy, he easily invents a woman who will drive his ex-wife crazy with jealousy.
What he’s not accustomed to, however, is having his creations come to actual life. Soon after he invents “Naomi,” Jordan begins to see and have conversations with his imaginary perfect girlfriend. Then he can’t stop himself from talking to Naomi, and that in itself begins to hinder his attempts to win back Isabelle. Also, no one else can see Naomi–only Jordan can–so he fears for his own sanity.
This plot combines many of the typical tropes of the male mid-life crisis story with classic Hollywood romantic comedy (not to mention movies like Harvey, the 1950 film in which James Stewart plays Elwood P. Dowd, who carries on a running conversation with a gigantic rabbit only he can see). Naturally, Jordan begins to fear that in his attempts to make Isabella mad, he’s lost his own mind instead. Ultimately, Mernit manages to craft true romance and to satirize it at the same time.
In The Future of Love, Shirley Abbott has assembled a whole cast of characters undergoing different types of crises in New York City in the fall of 2001. There’s Sam Mendel, a former publishing bigwig cheating on his prim and proper wife with Antonia. He can’t bring himself to leave his wife, Edith, however, and so their affair seems doomed from the start. Antonia’s daughter, Maggie, is somewhat disappointed in her life with feckless and perpetually unemployed husband Mark (recently laid off from an investment firm) and daughter Sophie. For his part, Mark begins an aimless affair with Sophie’s young nursery school teacher. The events of September 11 bring Mark’s affair to a head much sooner than it otherwise might have reached that point. He is meant to be in the Twin Towers on that morning for a job interview and, seeing his out, he runs off to Queens with his lover and decides to fake his own death. The disappearance never quite convinces anyone, however, and eventually even his lover tires of him (for much the same reasons his wife had earlier).
Abbott works the situation for poignancy and feeling by not making Mark too much of a creep. Though he’s the character with the “classic” mid-life crisis here, all the characters (with the exception of Sophie, perhaps) could be said to be undergoing similar types of crisis, no matter their ages. Sam is facing the fact that he is more dedicated to his material belongings and his station in life than he previously thought; Antonia is acknowledging her loneliness. Going with the flow has backed each of these characters into a different corner.
Netherland (2008) by Joseph O'Neill
In Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, too, September 11 sets off a male middle-age crisis. Dutch New York City resident Hans van den Broek, a banker, is left solo after his wife decamps to London with their two young children (their marriage is already faltering), and he’s forced out of their Tribeca loft and takes up residence at the Hotel Chelsea. Hans fills the gap not with another woman, but with a renewed enthusiasm for cricket, which he played as a child. He becomes involved in a league filled with other expats, mostly from the West Indies and parts of Asia that were once British colonies, who play in the outer boroughs of New York in areas that previously had been unfamiliar to him.
Hans also strikes up a friendship with Chuck, a Trinidadian entrepreneur who longs to construct a cricket stadium as a moneymaking venture and is involved with organized crime. (The book begins a few years in the future with Hans receiving a call telling him that Chuck’s body has been found in the Gowanus Canal, so the reader knows that he won’t come to a good end.) Without his family to ground him, Hans drifts through the days and revels in memories of other chapters in his life, questioning the very issue of identity. Hans contemplates the idea that every person is a completely different individual at different points in his or her life, and that we tell ourselves ever-changing versions of a life narrative. As he grapples to regain his bearings–in a quest that runs parallel to the city’s own struggle to right itself after almost toppling–he also works to reestablish his identity and to get over the hump of his mid-life crisis.
The title The Story of a Marriage, Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel (follow-up to the well-received The Confessions of Max Tivoli), is slightly misleading. The novel is more the story of a man, who happens to be married. More specifically, it is the story of Holland Cook, as seen through the eyes of Pearlie Ash, who is first his childhood sweetheart in Kentucky and then his wife in San Francisco. The two are out of touch in the 1940s, when Holland is serving overseas. They meet by happenstance shortly after he returns, renew their relationship, and soon wed.
Holland has been injured in the war and suffers from a weak heart, and the couple’s son has polio, but to all appearances the pair seem happily married in 1953 when Buzz Drumer, who served with Holland, appears at their door in San Francisco. Buzz is a wealthy man who has made a fortune off of corsets. He identifies himself to Pearlie as Holland’s former boss and proceeds to hang around every night for almost six months, but Pearlie senses that there is something more between the two men. For one thing, they dress in a very similar style.
Though the novel is a story of male mid-life crisis, some of the narrative is provided through Pearlie’s eyes. Slowly it dawns on her that Buzz is more than a mere acquaintance of her husband’s: she realizes that the two have been lovers. Holland’s aunts’ warnings that she will be forced to take extra-special care of Holland and perhaps shouldn’t marry him suddenly take on new meaning. Pearlie is also following the Rosenberg trial closely and spends a great deal of time considering what Ethel Rosenberg’s heated defense of her own husband says about the nature of love.
While Holland’s particular mask and cover-up may be extreme, most stories of male mid-life crisis seem to rely on the feeling that the mask is being pulled away, or that somehow the path that a protagonist has followed has not led to the expected end point. (Think of the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” with David Byrne droning, “This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”) In Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, that idea takes concrete shape when Leo Liebenstein awakens one morning, looks at his wife, Rema, and decides that the being living with him is not the real Rema, but what he calls a “simulacrum.” Much like Arthur Camden, who sets off looking for peace of mind in A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, psychiatrist Leo sets off to track down his actual wife. This picaresque journey takes him as far as Patagonia and puts him in touch with a renowned meteorologist who may or may not be involved in controlling the weather. This plays off Leo’s strange relationship with a psychiatric patient, Harvey, who goes missing around the same time. Harvey was seeking treatment because he thought he was the target of coded newspaper messages from the Royal Academy of Meteorology that would enable him to control the weather. At Rema’s suggestion, Leo’s treatment of Harvey consisted in part in revealing that he, too, was part of the same weather-controlling apparatus.
Throughout his search, Leo serves as an unreliable guide to the events surrounding him. Rema, or her simulacrum, accompanies him on his journey, insisting all the while that she is who she says she is. But Leo is too rocked by middle-age self-doubt to believe her and ignores her in favor of the imagined real Rema he seeks.
If coming-of-age stories are popular in part due to the identification factor–surely everybody has one–what about airport horror stories? Jonathan Miles’s novel of mid-life crisis, Dear American Airlines, takes the form of a long letter to the airline of the title, composed by one very cranky Benjamin Ford, who is in his mid-fifties. Benjamin is stuck in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on his way to his daughter’s wedding in California from New York. His connecting flight is cancelled, and in writing to the airline to complain and to request reimbursement, he airs a lifetime of grievances with his friends, his family, and himself. In doing so, he reveals the classic restlessness and lack of fulfillment found in the male mid-life crisis novel.
Benjamin starts off demanding a refund, but before long he has laid out the sad (though humorously told) story of his failed marriage–like most of the characters in these books, Benjamin is a bit of a drinker–and the decline of his mother into mental illness. Benjamin’s father survived a Nazi labor camp, and Benjamin himself makes a living translating literature from Polish into English. The job is clearly meant to symbolize the arm’s reach distance that Benjamin keeps from everyone and everything. For a person with literary pretensions, working as a translator is the equivalent of serving as bridesmaid rather than standing as bride. It turns out the daughter Benjamin is flying to see wed is none too fond of him, either. Indeed, he has troubled relationships with almost everyone he knows. That’s the sad–yet funny–fate of almost all men suffering from mid-life crises, at least as represented in many current novels.
Recommended Titles:
All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Future of Love by Shirley Abbott
A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living by Michael Dahlie
Imagine Me and You by Billy Mernit
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Olive Kitteredge by Elizabeth Strout
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
- Natalie Danford is the author of Inheritance, a novel published by St. Martin’s Press. She is also co-editor of the annual Best New American Voices anthology series, which introduces emerging writers. An experienced freelance writer and book critic, Natalie has published articles and reviews in People, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and many other publications.
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