My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale

Since Mr. Atlas wrote this timeless piece, the stock market has crashed, our 401Ks have shrunk and some of us no longer have our 5 figure monthly salarys. When I picked the book up at my local library - I was not sure if I would read it - but I have devoured it and will recommend to my book club... many of whom have either lost jobs, lost partners, parents, siblings, or even children, and of the least, have lost our retirement pensions and will be working for the next 10-15 years even though we are coming 'round to 60. Mr. Atlas has written what all of us have felt and he does it superbly. The inclusion of various pieces of fiction, plays and such that he references, inspires us to go back to our own bookshelves and re-read. One does not have to be uber-rich to relate to the petty day to day - nor today - relate to Bernie Madoff victims. This book is a must read for anyone who goes to bed at night and spends several hours tossing and turning and wondering "what if"... "what if"... "what if" or maybe just asking "why"??? It grabs you in the gut.

What a great story about what is the best time of life. Told with a sense of place in the world...

In one of the central chapters of this work James Atlas writes about the concept of 'life-failure'. He describes the moment of his at the age of fifty being fired, and being forced to consider himself as someone who has not made it in life. He then goes on , somewhat more interestingly, to talk about failures in Literature and comes to what may be the greatest modern literay example of all, Willy Loman, the failure in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." He considers how great literature provides a kind of recognition and understanding of our own situation that moves in the deepest way. At the closing of the first performance of 'Death of a Salesman' the audience did not applaud. It sat stunned. Grown men bent over in their seats , many of them weeping. They recognized in the failure of Willy Loman failures that they had known, perhaps their own, perhaps their fathers'. Atlas tells in this work of keeping a kind of score-card in which he would follow the professional lives of his classmates, and see who had gotten where in the ' wealth' and 'fame 'derby. A self- confessed child of the lower- middle class( His grandfather was a multi-lingual druggist, and his father a physician in Chicago).It becomes clear to him in his middle -age, the age of closing possibilities and horizons, that he will not get to to the top of the greasy pole. And in this sense be a failure, or perhaps what he regards many to be a 'thwarted life'. Yet looking from outside at the life and career of Atlas' one could conceivably paint a very different picture. He is a very well-known biographer who has written what to this point is the definitive work on his literary - hero Saul Bellow.He wrote an earlier much praised biography of Delmore Schwartz. He has worked for and written for major literary venues - 'The New York Times Book Review', 'The Atlantic', 'The New Yorker'. He has founded his own publishing line of 'literary biography' supported by Wall Street maven Thomas Lipper. He has thus in the eyes of most achieved a career success well beyond the average. But if his dream was the dream Harold Bloom says is characteristic of literary inheritors, to somehow overcome the great inspiring predecessor , of course , he has not done that. Bellow, however his life and character whittled down a bit in Atlas' biography is a literary giant of the American twentieth- century. Bellow's kind of success, even in portraying ' failure' as in his depiction of Atlas'most beloved Bellow character , Herzog , is another level of emotional intensity in his work. Bellow in fact with Tommy Wilhem in 'Seize the Day' makes a kind of intense universal cry of pain in 'failure' which certainly has few literary equals anywhere. Atlas is an insightful , often moving and interesting writer about his own life. He appears to be a decent commendable son, husband, father and human being. He has produced literary work of very high quality. But very very few are true giants, and the bell tolls even for them

Having been a contemporary of Atlas's at Harvard nearly 40 years ago, I was pulled back to that time when we spent hours in the womblike campus setting --priviliged to fantasize about where we were headed. In the blink of an eye, here we are, still trying to make sense of our lives -- but now dealing with all these losses of opportunities, loved ones, energy, dreams and illusions. Atlas hits all the big issues -- death of parents, loss of job, stiffening joints, anxieties about money and marriage and status amongst peers. It's poignant and provocative and, as Atlas has himself done many times, I, too, teared up -- facing up to the reality that there's likely a lot more living behind me than ahead. All in all, a wonderful collection of thoughtful, poignant, sweet, and revealing musings on the beginning of the endgame from a guy who writes about the kind of stuff we'd prefer to ignore, but know we need to reflect on.

Sharp,and witty while at the same time casting a warm and gentle gaze at the daily trials and tribulations of our baby-boomer generation, James Atlas captures the essence of what it means to reach that defining decade. His chapters speak to those of us whose parents are aging and whose children have left the nest; those of us who think of ourselves as successful until we face the reality of the New York real estate market as we attempt to downsize and divest ourselves of the "suburban" mini-estates where we raised our children. I laughed out loud,while calling out to my husband "He's talking about us."