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Middle Age: A Romance

Like many of Joyce Carol Oates' "lesser" books, this was so much stronger than the average book out there--the writing is so supple and precise, and the characterizations are so apt you laugh out loud. She is the current heavyweight champion of the American social novel, our Balzac... This is a lightweight compared with books like Blonde or We Were the Mulvaneys, an "entertainment"--as Graham Greene used to say of his ravishing but lesser books--it's a comic novel on the level of Bonfire of the Vanities but less cruel. Just what I was in the mood for.Middle Age examines the Updike territory-- the interlocking lives of often awful middle-aged, privileged denizens in the small historic town of Salthill-on-Hudson, and how many of them are thrown into crisis by the death of a beloved neighbor (and dream-lover of many of the local wives). Oates has a savage, scalpel-sharp understanding of these people and yet at the same time can empathize with their struggles--a wonderful brew. Loved how all the characters wear their middle age--these awful, suffering people and their awful children. The only happy man is the dead guy, Adam Berendt, a sculptor escaping a mysterious past.Everyone's story is told from their own point of view. There's Marina Troy, the bookseller and youngest of the Salthill ladies in love with Berendt, and Abigail des Pres, the divorcee obsessed with her sullen son, a beauty secretly desired by all the men in town, and Augusta Cutler, the ripe Rubenesque sexpot. There's Camille Hoffman, the soulful housewife. There's Adam's (and everyone's) lawyer Roger Cavanaugh, the uneasy "free man" an awful and delightful character whose relationship with women is tortured and full of twists... the secret protagonist of the book. Various husbands also go into a spin in theirshock at Adam's death--for many he was their only confidant and non-"Salthill husband" friend. This closely knit society explodes and then comes back together in new configurations as each middle aged person has his or her crisis. This book could have been played for high drama, but the comedic mode suits it beautifully. Whatever she's writing, comedy or intense drama, Joyce Carol Oates has a physician's eye and the chops to bring it home. Even in such a light book, she manages to fill the pages with terrific insights about the human condition.Here's just a tiny example. Roger Cavanaugh is doing pro bono work for a legal foundation, an innocence project (one of Adam's causes) interviewing a lazy public defender who had failed to properly defend a now death-row inmate: "By degrees, Spires caved in. You could see he was a man who enjoyed caving in, at his own pace..." "Spires spoke in a childish whine. Roger could see that through his adult life, 'Boomer' had escaped punishment by pleading incompetence. He'd made a racket out of humility..." His sexual escapades are always awful, interrupted or lacking in some way. "It wasn't that he was in love with Naomi... but he felt that she should be in love with him." What precision. Not one of her big serious books but a great 'entertainment.' Would have given it 4.5 but no half stars.
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