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 Middle Age
A Romance
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Ecco Press, 2001
464 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and—though they look much younger—middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town.
But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human? His loss and the rumors that surface of his possible lovers plunge his friends into grief, confusion, and self-reflection. The women who loved Adam find themselves engaging in life-altering romantic adventures. The men who were Adam's closest friends become utterly transformed in his absence. Adam's lawyer, Roger Cavanagh, who has broken the law for Adam's sake, becomes involved with an elusive and perhaps treacherous young woman. Marina Troy exiles herself to fulfill a wish Adam had made for her. Lionel Hoffmann sets out, unwisely but with great hope, to recapture his lost youth after a lifetime of soulless financial success, even as his wife, Camille, discovers an unspeakable joy close to home. Augusta Cutler, a hitherto sensuous, unreflective woman, defiantly endeavors to solve the mystery of Adam's origins, even if it means losing her marriage and family.
Middle Age: A Romance is an intimately drawn, richly sympathetic, yet unsparingly comic portrait of the affluent class at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Incisive, insightful, and never predictable, it's a uniquely American saga of self-determination and identity from one of our finest writers of contemporary fiction.
Excerpt
Is this fair? You leave your home in Salthill-on-Hudson on the muggy afternoon of July Fourth for a cookout (an invitation you didn't really want to accept, but somehow accepted) and return days later as ashes in a cheesy-looking funeral urn: bone chunks and chips and coarse gritty powder to be dumped out, scattered, and raked in the crumbly soil of your own garden.
Fertilizer for weeds.
Epigraphs
. . . I was trying to find out the meaning of certain dreams . . .
—Socrates speaking in Plato's Phaedo
Life devours life, but man breaks the cycle, man has memory.
Other Editions
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Reviews
- Booklist, July 2001, p. 1952
- Library Journal, August 2001, p. 164
- Publishers Weekly, August 13, 2001, p. 284
- Washington Post Book World, September 2, 2001, p. 4
- Boston Herald, September 9, 2001, p51
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 9, 2001, p. H10
- New York Times, September 13, 2001, p. E7
- Daily News (New York), September 16, 2001, sec. Showtime, p. 4
- Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 16, 2001, p. 1
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 16, 2001, p. 6E
- New York Times Book Review, September 16, 2001, p. 7
- USA Today, September 20, 2001, p. D7
- Chicago Sun-Times, September 23, 2001, sec. Show, p. 17
- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 23, 2001, p. G8
- Sydney Morning Herald, September 29, 2001, sec. Books, p.14
- Buffalo News, October 7, 2001, p. F7
- Florida Times-Union, October 14, 2001, p. G4
- Boston Globe, October 21, 2001, p. E4
- Book, November - December, p. 65
- Spectator, November 17, 2001, p.47
- Weekend Australian, November 17, 2001, p. R10
- TLS: Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2001, p. 23
- Canberra Times, November 24, 2001, p. A18
- Courier Mail, November 24, 2001, p. M7
- Australian Financial Review Magazine, November 30, 2001, p. 107
- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, December 2, 2001, p. 2
- Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 16, 2001, p. 5C
- Mail On Sunday, December 23, 2001, p. 58
- Richmond Times-Dispatch, December 23, 2001, p. E4
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/middleage.html
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