About a boomer

It would be easy to poke fun at the plaintive tone of this memoir, but the author has beaten us to it. Indeed, so effective has James Atlas been at laying into himself and exposing his flaws, large and small, in this artfully written, beguiling book that you would have to be stonyhearted indeed not to sympathize with him. Well-versed in both success and failure, Atlas has felt the itchy desire for still greater achievement that comes with the former -- as well as the agony of falling short in matters closest to his heart.

Many will envy Atlas. A happily married man and a proud father, he has written biographies of Delmore Schwartz and Saul Bellow, held editorial positions at a variety of prestigious institutions and launched two excellent biographical series, one of which bears his name. So why should he complain? Every life has to be judged on its own terms. “[D]oes the fact that I’ve suffered no tragedy mean that I’ve gone through life unscathed?” Atlas asks. When you read his wrenching account of how he felt when a quartet of heavyweight critics in the daily and Sunday New York Times, the Washington Post and the New Republic massacred his only novel, “The Great Pretender,” you understand how none of his laurels could ever make up for this failure. “It’s not enough to say that I took it hard,” he laments, “it felt as if a death had occurred -- the death of hope.”

Atlas has the gift of making his pain palpable; he’s a connoisseur of the gradations of defeat. (“[T]o fail in your early twenties is of a different order of magnitude from failing in your late thirties.”) He has a distinct gift for communicating the reality of what it feels like to be financially strapped -- and to be fired: “What was I supposed to say? What was the protocol ... ? Did you leap up and storm out of the room? Burst into tears? Be mature and help him out?”

But don’t get the impression that “My Life in the Middle Ages” is all anguish and complaint. The bitterness Atlas’ travails engender is leavened by a variety of sweeter emotions. There is a loving account of the last days of his father (a physician given to reciting poetry), which is made still more poignant by his positive but clear-eyed take on the parents’ enduring marriage. The glimpses Atlas gives us of his own wife and children are uniformly affectionate, and his tact in shielding them from too much authorial intrusion into their lives is admirable.

Along the way in this picaresque journey through middle age, there are amusing descriptions of various inevitable rites of passage. The chapter titled “Shrinks” is particularly funny, and the one about his encounters with financial planners (including an appalling pair he dubs Mutt and Jeff) is even funnier. Unlike the truly serious matters, such as his fate as a novelist, problems regarding mental health and losing money -- while undoubtedly painful -- still elicit his attractive sense of humor.

By the time Atlas reaches the hard-won conclusion that he can “be happy for the simple reason that I’m not dead, have enough money, and no one I love is sick,” it has become apparent that his subtitle is justified: He is a survivor. And he has lived to write what just may turn out to be the definitive testament of the middle-aged baby boomer. *