Outrunning the demons

THE midlife-crisis novel is well past middle age, of course, but still in fighting trim, if Alan Zweibel’s wry take on male menopause is any indication. Zweibel, part of “Saturday Night Live’s” first writing staff and collaborator on Billy Crystal’s one-man Broadway show, “700 Sundays,” writes with a jaundiced satirical eye about a harried suburban dad and the slow drip of ennui and indifference that’s killing his spirit.

Shulman is a New York native struggling to keep his stationery store in Fort Lee, N.J., afloat, to say nothing of his failing marriage. He is a man for whom no mercy has been given, or at least it feels that way to him. Yet, Zweibel writes, “anger was an emotion he had never been programmed to access.” Wallowing in self-pity, Shulman is so eager to leave all feathers unruffled that he keeps “reshaping himself in accordance to what others need him to be.”

But now he has decided to shake off the doldrums and enter the New York Marathon, for all the usual reasons that middle-aged men do such things. As Shulman endures the painful ritual of toning up his flabby body, everything goes pear-shaped on him. His wife, Paula, may or may not be having an affair, and his store is being threatened by a big-box retailer called Stationery Land.

Other, stranger currents are at work, though. It seems that all the weight he has lost in training, the same 30 pounds he’s been gaining and losing “since his bar mitzvah,” has taken corporeal form in another Shulman, the “Other Shulman” of the title, and this raging id is conspiring against him: tempting Shulman with mega-carb breakfasts, vandalizing his doctor’s office, even threatening him with physical violence.

This shadow presence is a vestigial reminder of everything Shulman is trying to suppress, and he’s powerless to do anything about it. His only recourse is to fight his demons on the hard pavement of the marathon route, which takes him through the multifarious neighborhoods of the city and the precincts of his memory: his grandparents’ old Brooklyn ‘hood, how Simon & Garfunkel meant so much to him as a kid and so on .

Zweibel’s ruminative detours are amusing, but they’re off-ramps from the narrative. The book is at its best when Zweibel concentrates on Shulman’s training mishaps. Eagerly following a comely female runner to determine whether her butterfly tattoo extends beyond her lower back, Shulman runs “until the landfill he’d consumed the night before could no longer withstand the spin cycle and wanted out. Which brought Shulman’s newfound hobby as a lepidopterist to a grinding halt.” This kind of winning deadpan humor is found throughout “The Other Shulman,” and Zweibel applies it with a light touch, making for an entertaining, funny read.