Rating: 
Summary: A Book to Read and Cherish
Review: Joyce Carol Oates has written another wonderful book! "Middle Age, A Romance" will draw you into the lives of its characters to such a degree that you end up feeling that they are real people whom you actually know. While the setting of this novel is a comfortable world of extraordinary wealth (far from the real world for many of us) outside New York City, the characters transcend their riches becoming unique individuals who are easy to care about. The thread which ties this novel together is the impact of their friend, Adam Berendt, on their lives. This book includes themes of change, hope, and growth which many would not believe possible for people in their middle years. Ms. Oates writes, as she always does, with warmth, wit and insight and has once again given us a book to read and someday re-read.
Rating:
Summary: A Book to Read and Cherish
Review: Joyce Carol Oates has written another wonderful book! "Middle Age, A Romance" will draw you into the lives of its characters to such a degree that you end up feeling that they are real people whom you actually know. While the setting of this novel is a comfortable world of extraordinary wealth (far from the real world for many of us) outside New York City, the characters transcend their riches becoming unique individuals who are easy to care about. The thread which ties this novel together is the impact of their friend, Adam Berendt, on their lives. This book includes themes of change, hope, and growth which many would not believe possible for people in their middle years. Ms. Oates writes, as she always does, with warmth, wit and insight and has once again given us a book to read and someday re-read.
Rating: 
Summary: Felt it went nowhere...
Review: Just finished reading it and felt I had wasted my time. I felt it kind of rambled back and forth, back and forth and went nowhere.
Rating: 
Summary: Introspective and intriguing
Review: Middle Age deals with a class of people who live, socialise and breed in an affluent, paradisical suburban ostensible paradise. It starts with the accidental death of its main protagonist who surfaces throughout the novel in relation to the characters who are alive.
The characters are sketched with a sympathetic eye, and so minutely that you almost see Roger Cavanagh ( one of the characters) with his baby son in your mind. Indeed middle age is a jourbey into the minds of ordinary yet affluent people. Boring people? It depends on what you are reading the novel for. Long drawn twists in the tale abound as each character does something remote from what the world perceives them as. A rich housewife gets drawn to animal specifically dog protection after her husband leaves her, another housewife leaves her family and magnificent home to search for the elusive dead Adam, and yet another redeems herself as a mother by mothering an adopted child. You get the sense that inspite of the furs and furniture and finesse these ladies ( and men) have some vaccum in their lives. What is the vaccum? Look into your own lives and see which character defines that for you.
Rating:
Summary: Starting New
Review: Middle Age is about several upper class characters exploring potential new paths at the mid-point of their lives. At its centre is Adam Berendt whose life is unexpectedly cut off, but whose influence and Socratic interrogation of life acts as a catalyst to transform his friends in the tight-knit community of Salthill. Their lives, as they understand them, dissolve upon his death to be reformed. The mystery of Adam's past is threaded throughout the novel opening dozens of different possible beginnings to his life at the same time as multiple endings to the other characters' lives are imagined. Oates' tremendous skill is to draw a multitude of realistic detail while emotionally constructing her characters' thoughts. This method works to unearth strange revelations in her contemplation of mortality and the depthless possibilities of experience. The characters tear off the costumes of their present identity to wear new masks and reconstitute their sense of being. Marina Troy's potentiality as an artist has lain dormant for many years, but, through Adam's bequest of a residence for solitude, she is given the possibility of expressing her vision. Augusta Cutler leaves her secure life to pursue dangerous new possibilities and trace Adam's past. These stories as well as those of the other characters are told in a revolving narrative focus that juxtaposes the characters' intentions with the dramatic realizations of their experiences. Their middle age lives turn out not to be about just endings, but multiple beginnings as well. The novel gives a heartfelt portrait of characters that identify themselves alternatively as amorphous and fabled beings and desperate to break from their identification of an ordinary life.
Rating:
Summary: Classic Oates!
Review: Middle Age, as in all Joyce Carol Oates stories and novels, operates on many levels. I will, therefore, try to give an overall sense without overwhelming. For those who like their classic Oates, it is all here in a big sprawling novel, a moral tale that combines realism, with fable, fantasy, humor, and horror, and set in an upstate New York village. The central character, the much beloved Adam Berendt, dies in the first chapter, and the rest of the novel is consumed by getting at the mystery of who he really was and what he meant to his bereaved friends and neighbors. The trick was to discover Adam by letting other characters speak for him. Since most, if not all, were almost irrationally taken with him, they may not be the most objective revealers, so finally I had a hard time taking their word that he was really that mesmerizing. However, as always, the writing is so brilliant and so original, so revelatory in other ways about human nature, about a tight claustrophobic community, the inspirational and the dark side of the human character, that it almost doesn't matter. One is willing to take it on faith. Oates always love to surprise and she does so expertly as she weaves her spell with each of the characters. Ultimately, Adam Berendt must remain at least a partial mystery because he can't speak for himself, but it is his friends on whom he had this mysterious impact who will all confront life-challenging changes, or middle age crises as the case may be, before the novel's end, and about whom we really want to know more.
Rating:
Summary: Joyce Carol Oates and the Coming Asunder of "Reality"
Review: Review of 'Middle Age: A Romance' by Joyce
Carol Oates by Barry Eysman 994 words Joyce Carol Oates is precise, keen,
engaging. And how fortunate that she is so
profound, prolific, trenchant, compassionate, and
constantly keeps us off guard. Her latest novel
'Middle Age: A Romance' is, as is much of her
work, a dialectic on the need to find a true world,
the life that shimmers just at the edges of things.
Her work is very prismatic, one sees various sides
of the diamond pendant she presents to us, about
the need for illusion, allusion, pretending so hard it
must be real, settling and denying. And in this huge
satisfying novel, the need to mold someone into a
hero of bemused detachment. Adam Berendt is a sculptor, icon,
mysterious doorway, the linchpin of the wealthy
community Salthill-on-Hudson, who dies in a
heroic death, it seems, to find his heraldic presence
compressed into ashes in a urn, which is surely not
the way heroes should end, as basically manure, and
served up in a one two opening punch of the novel,
making him what anyone wants--'gone' instead of
dead, spinning everyone out of orbit. Freeing them
to find this 'something' they want. The men who
were shadows of him. The women who were
allowed at least sexual fantasies about him, as age
encroaches, and you might as well believe in
something. Lives fly into fluttery frenzy, hearts burn
with old aches of finding true innocence, or
seeming innocence, as Lionel who has left his wife,
thinks he has found with Siri--'When did I fall in
love with you, I fell in love at once. Your hands.
Your touch.' And young Siri is innocent even
though she isn't. The constant human contradiction
in Oates' work is inside characters who don't
understand themselves or each other, and through
cynicism and decades of quiet hurt, aren't
particularly sure they want to try anymore. To
touch innocence, to deflower it and it still be
innocent, no fingerprints ever. How? When Adam (who is not of course what he
was cracked up to be--but who oddly does give
Marina something of a gift, once her attempt at
making poetry out of ugliness and ordinariness has
been shattered--settling) dies, it is believed hardest
hit is his dog Apollo, who drifts, a touchstone, now
in Adam's place. People see themselves in him as
people always did in Adam. Jared with
youthfulness, says about Apollo, '...he's
lonely...He's looking for--something he can't find.'
Darkness. Life as shifting dreams, bodies that can't
be made young even by denial after a time. Middle
age and still nervous teenagers, waiting for
someone to tell them what to do. Private eye
named Elias West. The name intrigues Augusta.
Why not that as main attraction? It's not as silly as
some things in a world where people who have to
be reminded they are alive. Who are usually
unhappily surprised when they discover this. Adam's death is noble extremis. It was the only
way he could live. Machines drive Camille, all of
the people--the machines of Earth and life and
aging, and everything is 'quick and bright as a
January morning' as a character in an Oates' short
story describes her anticipation of a 'winter's
death.' Roger's daughter Robin plays with her
father's head of clichés with a mecuricalness that is
endearing and maddening. Obsession with youth,
the desire to make Adam into a beast of Greek
mythology, a stag, bulky and strong and ugly in his
beauty, a thing of power, too shimmering to truly
touch, but the need of the giddy prospect of it. The characters are physically and mentally weighed.
Skins seem as 'though put on with a trowel.' Minute imperfections become major ones because
characters are examining themselves because that is
not them. To dream of death in that nervous cagey
jangling way, and Oates working into her
characters is a wonder and is so exciting, it is
saying this is reality and it is filled with all this
sloppiness of living, all the confusion, the irony,
things read, childhood dreams turned on their
heads, emotions, thoughts fresh fast electric
minnows dart, then gone, breathless running broken eclectic sentences, grab bags of evanescence,
cowardice and courage. Naked and quivering.
'What's to be proud of?' Who are we? We are
topographies and territories and we are filled with
everything human and lustful and scared and mean
and betraying. There are many warts and desperate attempts to
love what is unlovely, to plow into it regardless and
hope to get used to the dirty saggy ice flow of it.
The kind that one skates on for so long, then
realizes what it is, the kidding's off, so then what
do you do? It seems Oates is saying--what if you've
been wrong about everything all your life? What if
you've become a cartoon and everyone is laughing
at you? Do you keep on doing it? Someone has to
be keeper of the flame. Will it be--ah-- you--sigh
and pause? This novel like most of her work is about wanting
to end everything, wanting to shed this form, trying
to see into another person's eyes and terrified, glad,
there may be nothing there at all. She sees reality
and the fiction persons desperately spin around it.
She overlays these things and presents the shifting
coiled to strike languorous real and complete fabric
we make of ourselves and the world around us.
Oates is gutsy, intelligent, so deadly funny at times.
Reading her work is like being pummeled about in a
ring by the best prize fighter going. Boxing is a love
of hers. Her words ring of it. They are electric.
They get so close to the core of the shivering center
of the very being of life. Joyce Carol Oates, in the trenches with the rest of
us, is dazzled by seeing into the heart and mind of
her generation. She and 'Middle Age' are brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: One of her better ones but silly
Review: The story kept my attention and I was amused by the characters although not one of them rang true. I was also dismayed by the author's depiction of grown children as greedy ingrates. The author apparently does not realize that happy relationships between parents and adult children are the norm, not the exception. You can also tell that Oates, who has cats for pets, is not a dog-lover. A silly book meant to amuse and obtain insight into the author's dislikes but
don't look for anything deeper.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging
Review: This is an amazing book, centering on one man's effect on his community during his life and after his death. Although Adam Berendt is killed off in the first chapter, it is profound to see his lingering effect on the lives of those who loved him. Adam, or the perception of Adam, was a true catalyst for the rich, but spiritually deprived residents of Salthill. As one finds out more about "Adam," however, it becomes increasingly clear that he has been put on a pedestal as some sort of soothsayer. Later, the book reveals the tragic truth about Adam. Among the many mysteries of Adam, his sexuality is in question. Yet it is left up to the reader to decide whether he was gay, asexual, or just plain scared of true intimacy. We all know, have known, or will know someone like Adam. Many of us have or have had a confidante to whom we can tell anything--yet we walk away not knowing much about them. Joyce Carol Oates' main characters are engaging and sympathetic. Despite their sheltered, financially rich lives, they are searching for more. Many have taken brave, unconventional steps because of Adam's lingering influence on their lives. Some, too, have made tragic choices and have had to face the consequences. There are some peripheral characters as well, such as loathsome ex-husbands and surly teenagers, that round out the lot and provide entertainment as well. Although the book is lengthy, each page is absorbing, and, as with any excellent book, I was sad to have reached the final word. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging
Review: This is an amazing book, centering on one man's effect on his community during his life and after his death. Although Adam Berendt is killed off in the first chapter, it is profound to see his lingering effect on the lives of those who loved him. Adam, or the perception of Adam, was a true catalyst for the rich, but spiritually deprived residents of Salthill. As one finds out more about "Adam," however, it becomes increasingly clear that he has been put on a pedestal as some sort of soothsayer. Later, the book reveals the tragic truth about Adam. Among the many mysteries of Adam, his sexuality is in question. Yet it is left up to the reader to decide whether he was gay, asexual, or just plain scared of true intimacy. We all know, have known, or will know someone like Adam. Many of us have or have had a confidante to whom we can tell anything--yet we walk away not knowing much about them. Joyce Carol Oates' main characters are engaging and sympathetic. Despite their sheltered, financially rich lives, they are searching for more. Many have taken brave, unconventional steps because of Adam's lingering influence on their lives. Some, too, have made tragic choices and have had to face the consequences. There are some peripheral characters as well, such as loathsome ex-husbands and surly teenagers, that round out the lot and provide entertainment as well. Although the book is lengthy, each page is absorbing, and, as with any excellent book, I was sad to have reached the final word. I highly recommend this book.
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