Middle Age: a romance - Softcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

3.59

2,687 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007336608 ISBN 13: 9780007336609

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2009

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A tender, hilarious novel about contemporary America. With ‘Middle Age’ Joyce Carol Oates has been acclaimed as one of the most important writers of her time.

Salthill-on-Hudson is half an hour outside New York, a place where the inhabitants are beautiful, rich and, though they look younger than they really are, middle-aged.

When the enigmatic sculptor Adam Berendt dies suddenly, his death sends shock waves through the town. His loss and rumours of Adam's possible lovers force the community to re-evaluate their lives.

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 fulfil a wish Adam had made for her. Lionel sets out, unwisely but with great hope, to re capture his youth lost after a lifetime of financial success, even as his wife Camille discovers an unspeakable joy close to home. Augusta Cutler, a hitherto sensuous, unreflective woman, sets out defiantly to solve the mystery of Adam's origins.

‘Middle Age’ is an intimately drawn group portrait and a richly sympathetic yet unsparingly comic portrait of present-day affluent America from one of the finest writers of contemporary fiction.

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About the Author:

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From Publishers Weekly:

A romance? The hero dies in the opening pages, adolescents renounce their parents and the grownups aren't true to themselves, much less each other, because they have no idea what they are. In the Lexus-crowded town of Salthill-on-Hudson, husbands and wives share beds in which the linens meet more crisply than the bodies. "How eternal is a single night, and of what eternities are our long marriages composed!" And yet romance is deep in the bones of this soaring epic of renewal and redemption, an Easter of the flesh, a Viagra of the soul. Sculptor Adam Berendt goes into cardiac arrest while saving a child from drowning, and so redeems the 50-somethings of Salthill with his death; he confers the idea and the actuality of grace on their lives. It may be said of Oates's oeuvre that it is a long marriage between author and reader, composed of many eternities. Her sentences seem to contain more sentiment per word than anyone else's. She punishes us with terrible truths: Death lurks at every window and Eros is a demon, worshiped at awful cost. In marriages charged with such import, one must cheat in order to breathe, as Augusta Cutler discovers after Adam's death, when she leaves her husband, Owen, to ferret out the truth about Adam, and herself, and to find respite. Reminiscent of her powerful Black Water, but equipped with a happy ending, Oates's latest once more confirms her mastery of the form. (Sept. 10)Forecast: Of late, Oates can do no wrong. Deep in her career, she is pulling out the stops again. Since the success of Blonde, and Oprah's February 2001 selection of We Were the Mulvaneys, more readers than ever will be gravitating to her new work (and her backlist, too), and they should be thoroughly satisfied with her latest offering.

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