From Publishers Weekly
Penguin Lives' founding editor Atlas (Bellow; Delmore Schwartz) offers 11 rather self-involved essays about being in his 50s. The collection hits on various midlife themes—"Mom and Dad" describes Atlas's father's illness and its effects on the family; "Home" explores the joys and pains of owning a country house; "Money" focuses on, well, money—and brings out the author's envious and insecure side. In his introduction, Atlas confesses that he writes from within a "highly rarified segment of society," but hopes all readers will find something of themselves in each piece. Despite exploring such universal themes, Atlas often steers away from their common aspects to instead dwell on his own personal disappointments. In "Failure," he recounts receiving a negative review of his novel, and in "The Body," he gets sullen when his son trounces him on the tennis court. Atlas's strength lies in his extensive literary allusions, and each of these essays is buoyed by examples from both well-known and obscure authors, which often serve to augment the lackluster revelations ("The rich, the powerful, the well-known made it because they had the drive to make it"; "Depression is like an illness—it is an illness"). Thoughtful but self-conscious, these pieces seem more like exercises in catharsis than meditations on a period in life when we are "on the verge of reaching our limits." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Atlas takes stock of himself at midlife--as son, husband, father, and writer--and provides a probing look at what it means when youth is definitively over and old age has not yet arrived. With an accomplished career at major magazines, including the New York Times Book Review, Time, and Vanity Fair, Atlas is nonetheless candid about his personal disappointments: the novels not published, the assignments not offered or accepted, the books not read. Covering such topics as parents, kids, real estate, money, shrinks, failure, work, friends, books, God, vows, and death, Atlas looks at the major challenges and realizations of midlife. His father's illness and death figure prominently as he examines his own youth, marriage, and relationship with his children. Looking back on reminiscent reports for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his college graduating class, Atlas notes assorted shortfalls and reduced expectations, lamenting the American worship of material success and the lack of appreciation for the self-revelation that can be found in failure. A humorous, eloquent, and poignant look at the aging process. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover -- for better and worse -- who we are.
My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that attend the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author's own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he's read and the life that he chose -- and that chose him -- My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic, poignant memoir that's both personal and generational.
Whether he is struggling with God (or trying to find out if he believes in one), celebrating the books he's loved and regretting those he'll never read, or leafing through the snapshots in his family album and marveling at the passage of time, James Atlas is always alert to the surprises of everyday life. He parses the fine points of success and failure among New York's "lower upper-middle class" (several of the chapters began as essays in The New Yorker) and expresses the largest themes: "I tried to remind myself that death was a part of life. I was here, then I wouldn't be here."
Atlas writes movingly about watching his parents age and his father die. In a wry and soul-searching piece, he recounts his perplexing quest for spiritual meaning after a secular lifetime, a quest that takes him to a private synagogue and a Buddhist meditation center. On the tennis court, he ruefully capitulates to his teenage son's blossoming athletic prowess, recalling a similar passing of the torch with his own father forty years earlier.
At once pensive and funny, lighthearted and profound, My Life in the Middle Ages is a tale of survival, but also a meditation on how it feels to flourish -- how to live.
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