Middle Age: A Romance

Author - Joyce Carol Oates ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Harper Perennial was reviewed on 12-Dec-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial. Just when I think she´s "done it all," JCO comes up with this masterful satire, hilarious, dark, amusing, witty, and yes, even romantic! I´ve read books "like" it before, but none handled so beautifully. From start to finish, she pulls it off, with quirky characters and hip, cultural details that had my head spinning. I learned a lot, especially, as usual from this author, about the writing of beautiful prose. The woman is a literary diva. However, this is one soap opera NOT for TV, but for the pleasure-loving mind of a dedicated (and yes, let´s face it, addicted) bibliophile. (By the way, I listened, for nineteen delicious hours, to the CD. Mary Pfeiffer´s voice is perfect - and sublime). I guess you can tell I´m a JCO fan. I´m coming to the conclusion lately that there is no other writer who can touch her. I just can´t help wondering why she´s never won the Pulitzer, or even the Nobel, for her incredible, far-reaching work. And this year, when the NYT chose the ten best books of the year, her name was not on the list for "The Gravedigger´s Daughter" or "My Sister, My Love," two masterpieces. Is it because she´s so prolific that the critics just can´t keep up with her? (Dummies.)¤

2) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial. I decided to read this novel on the strength of Amazon readers´ reviews and the author´s reputation. Now I wonder if we have read the same book.

The sculptor and art teacher Adam Berendt dies and is missed by his friends and admirers, residents of the same wealthy, rural New York suburb. The death leads them to rearrange their lives. They have affairs, they adopt dogs, they take trips, they sculpt, they try to connect with their estranged, teenage children. The sculptor acts, in their memories, as philosophic mentor, a Socratic ideal though he is rich (this is America) and has a vaguely criminal past. There is no more plot to this book designed like a mosaic.

My impression is that of a best-selling writer gone lazy. The subject might still make for an entertaining social tableau if the characters were interesting, but aside from a few, they tend to be without depth. The men are either women in men´s clothing (you know many straight men who flick their hair from their brow?), or lifeless stereotypes. Teenagers are always estranged from their parents. Only a few of the female protagonists have appeal. And the dilemmas are superficial, the philosophy of the grandmotherly-wisdom type.

This book is far too long, tedious, and seemed to me sloppily written. The only saving grace to the broken sentences, the constant repetitions, is that they make for easier speed-reading. Nor do the references to painting and sculpture help, all safe, designed to flatter rather than enlighten the reader (and sometimes hasty; I began to wonder if Ms Oates has ever seen a Rousseau), much as the gratuitous name references (Marina Troy: get it? Troy, the Greeks. So witty! And she finds revelation in Damascus Crossing. See? The road to Damascus. We are all so smart!). If you are looking for a portrait of wealthy suburban America, the TV series Desperate Housewives will do just as well; at least it has good dialogue, and it is just as profound.¤

3) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial. I spent a whole month driving to work and back home listening in my car to Joyce Carol Oates´s darkly comic yet compelling and even warm novel "Middle Age: A Romance" as read by Mary Peiffer on 19 CDs. I´d spent 21 hours in the fictional Salthill-on-Hudson, half an hour outside Manhattan, New York, which is a small peaceful community of educated, attractive, and wealthy people, mostly couple married for many years but some are single or divorced, where "everyone is middle-aged" in their 40s, 50s or even 60s but looks much younger. The main character of the novel, charismatic and mysterious sculptor Adam Berendt dies on the very first page. His tragic unexpected drowning in the Hudson River as he tries to rescue a child has an enormous and profound effect on his friends, both men and women. The loss of a friend make these people look at their lives, marriages, relationships, and careers in a new and often painful light, learn that life can be changed even in the middle age when the passions, feelings, and desires seem to have disappeared from their sleepy, ordered, and comfortable existence, and actually change their lives and themselves with the different results, optimistic and hopeful in some cases, dark and even tragic in the others.


Joyce Carol Oates possesses such a great talent as a writer, such precision and accuracy at analyzing and describing the smallest details of the human conditions and motivations that she is able to make not heroic, sometimes arrogant and in the beginning of the novel useless, weak and pathetic characters interesting and sympathetic, alive and multi-dimensional. She actually made me believe that the changes are possible at any stage of life as the story (or rather stories of several Salthill-on-Hudson´s residents who have been all affected by Adam Berendt´s life and death) progresses. Listening to the novel as read by Mary Peiffer was a great pleasure of enjoying the harmony of the brilliantly written prose and its sound.
¤

4) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial. Oates dedicates the novel to "To my Princeton friends who are nowhere in these pages." But unlike many of her other works most of the many characters are sympathetic and generous. They support worthy causes, and most are appealing, so it would not be an insult if they were like some of her Princeton friends.

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels, short stories, essays, plays, and poetry. The present novel from 2001 is somewhere near the end of the chronological order of her body of work and we see the polished prose of an experienced writer. I have read a number of her works from different time periods in her career and set up a Guide to Joyce Carol Oates Listmania list. Compared to her early novels, this is a straightforward and almost a "light" read without much intense drama, and certainly less than other recent Joyce novels such as The Falls. The novel has a nice story structure and easy prose, and the reader is spared the "too much prose" found in some early works such as The Assassins.

Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women or even poor women such as students or teachers caught up in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York (Niagara River - Syracuse - Erie,PA. triangle). Actually, some of her best work is found in her 10 to 20 page short stories, which are often dramatic, sometimes very intense, and many involve off-beat characters, and rapes, murders, and people with serious mental health issues, etc. People who have not read her collections of short stories should take a look at those. The present novel contains few of those off-beat elements. It is a story set in a small town or group of towns on the Hudson river, and as Oates tells us it is a 28 minute commuter train ride from the center of New York city. Some of the characters work in New York city and just live in the area. Most of the people in her novel are wealthy or at least comfortable financially.

The story begins with the death of a middle aged man on a July 4th weekend. Adam Berendt dies of natural causes while swimming to rescue a child. He has a heart attack. As we learn, he is somewhat mysterious character, but he is also an admired friend of many in the town of Salthill on the Hudson. We follow the people after the death and how they interact and change, including a younger women who he admired and who runs a local book store.

This is a relatively compelling read, but lacks the intensity of some of Oates´s short stories. As a work by Oates it is almost a bit "tame." It is about the characters and how they change after the death, or there personal views and feelings, and their relations. It is a theme more subtle than some of her other works and the novel is a very easy read.

This is an entertaining story that most Oates fans will love, and many others will like. It is an easy and quick read.
¤

5) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial. Decades ago, in a young pique, I "gave up reading" Joyce Carol Oates. I vowed I would never pick up another book again. I have no idea why, or which or her works at the time precipitated this decision, but I felt so strongly about it, I continued to shun her works.

Finally, I picked up the unabridged version of this book on CD (19 discs!) and became mesmerized by the story of one rather ordinary-seeming man, Adam Berendt, who transforms the lives of everyone he meets in the small upstate New York village of Salt-Hill-on-Hudson.

Since Adam dies in an accident very early on in the book, we are left to meet and decipher all the acquaintances whose lives he very much affected--from the middle-aged wives who, to a woman, all fell into unrequited love with him, to the younger Marina Troy, a single woman who thought he was her lover (although the relationship was never consummated), to the various husbands in Adam´s circle, all of whom either admired him almost as much as their wives, or were affected by him whether they wanted to be or not.

The mystery of who Adam was--or was not--is hinted at during the accident, when we get a brief glimpse into his thoughts. The actuality of it is not solved until more than 3/4 into the book, and is anticlimactic, although upsetting.

To my great shock, the book has a happy ending of sorts. I did not expect that, and I´m not sure it actually fit the story, but it does tie in with Adam´s redemptive qualities.

Will I read another by Oates? I don´t think so. I think this was enough, although I can´t think of anything bad to say about it.¤

6) Paperback Book Middle Age: A Romance by Harper Perennial.

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?¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 9-Jan-2009, 00609349059780060934903, 050-3X0-370-420-010-920-240-8

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