Judgy kids, road-trips and ‘epic scenes of female masturbation’: welcome to the new midlife crisis novel | Books

What’s the age limit for a midlife crisis? I wanted the protagonist of my latest novel to have two kids, a son old enough to judge him (maybe in grad school?), and a daughter just about to set off for uni. The story starts when he drops her off in their old Volvo station wagon and keeps driving. His father has died, his wife has had an affair … You need to find the point in life at which various pressures converge: of marriage and ambition, of ageing and dying parents, of children leaving home.

Luckily, from a novelist’s point of view, our definition of midlife seems to be expanding. When the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques coined the term “midlife crisis” in 1965, the age he had in mind was our middle 30s; average UK male life expectancy was 65. Now it’s 80, but there have been cultural shifts, too. These are harder to measure, but it feels as though the emotional distance between generations has shrunk. Parents now argue with their children over the family Spotify account. All of which means that the literature describing midlife has also expanded – and allowed writers to bring a new range of experiences into its orbit.

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Maybe it was just a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name, suggests the narrator of All Fours

That includes, of course, the experience of women. Jacques’ original paper didn’t have much to say about women, because their “transition is often obscured … by the proximity of the onset of changes connected with the menopause”. It’s a strange phrase, but several recent novels have done their best to un-obscure it. In Miranda July’s All Fours, her unnamed narrator suggests to one of her friends that “maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name. I imagined such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.”

July’s novel has attracted a lot of attention. There are epic scenes of female masturbation that recall another breakout novel about one of those “silly men”, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy – and, more recently, Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Toby Fleishman. But July’s narrator is 45. Her sexual experimentation isn’t about Freudian hangups (Portnoy’s Complaint is framed as a confession to his shrink); it stems from fears about ageing and the loss of libido. All Fours contains an actual graph of the way male and female sex hormones decline over time. While the man’s dips, the woman’s falls “off a cliff”.

Recent novels by Claire Lombardo (Same As It Ever Was) and Catherine Newman (Sandwich) stretch midlife out further, taking as their starting point women in their mid-50s. It isn’t just menopause, though, that drives these novels, but the way a hundred different worries suddenly align. “Life is a seesaw,” Rocky, the mother in Sandwich, reflects, “and I am standing dead centre, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other … Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.”

Miranda July Photograph: Jessica Chou/The Observer

July’s solution in All Fours is to follow a kind of “kink” in the universe, to go “the opposite of the way you instinctually want to go”. Her protagonist, married, mother of a young child, sets off on a work trip from LA to New York (she’s an artist and writer, like July herself) but doesn’t make it further than half an hour from home, when she stops at a cheap motel and spends 20 grand fixing up her room to look like a five-star hotel. The point of this dip into surrealism is to create a kind of moral weightlessness, which loosens the pull of husband and child and allows her to imagine her life afresh: “One day I really would leave this house, these people, this city, and live a completely different life.”

In spite of her maternal anxieties, Rocky wants something similar: “I want something to change. But what?” And then, of course, whether you want them to or not, things change anyway. Sandwich is framed as a series of visits over time to the same rented house in Cape Cod; they’ve been going since the kids were small. “The experience,” as Rocky puts it, “is deeply layered … [like a] matryoshka doll … popping open, all the little nested selves tumbling out.”Lombardo’s Same As It Ever Was is layered like that matryoshka doll. It begins when Julia Ames runs into an old friend she knew 20 years before, when she was struggling with her first baby and her marriage almost went off the rails. That encounter sets off a chain of regrets and resentments, and the story moves back and forth in time, between those sleep-deprived early days and the quieter shores of her midlife years, which turn out to be not so quiet after all: her younger child is about to leave home, and that sleepless baby is now a man, and getting married. Both Lombardo and Newman exploit what you might call the DNA structure of family life: the way each part contains a code that represents the whole, and midlife gives you access to all of it. Meanwhile David Nicholls’s recent novel, You Are Here, is a reminder that it isn’t only family life that produces these crises but also the absence of it.

Marnie and Michael are stuck in the painful aftermaths of marriages when a mutual friend drags them together on a hiking holiday. Michael, a geography teacher, had long planned to walk Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk – to clear his head, and turn his loneliness into something more deliberate. His first marriage failed when they had trouble having children but he holds hopes of reuniting with his wife … until he is thrown together with copy editor Marnie.

Michael’s dilemma gets to the heart of the midlife crisis: the choice (or the illusion of a choice) between making the best of what’s left or forging something new. But both involve fear. My own protagonist, as he drives across the US, stops off along the way to see old friends, college buddies, his brother, an ex-girlfriend, before arriving in California to face the disapproval of his son. He sees, in other words, a lot of people dealing with their own midlife predicaments and realises that people’s capacity for change, for shedding skins, for moving on, is just as frightening as their willingness to stop changing, to stagnate, to give up.

The point of art is somehow to reconcile the two. As Jaques puts it: “Because the route forward has become a cul-de-sac, attention begins its Proustian process of turning to the past, working it over consciously in the present, and weaving it into the concretely limited future.” That process also explains the appeal of this moment to novelists. It helps that the midlife crisis has become roomy enough to let in the whole of our lives – an estate, now, rather than a convertible.

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is published by Faber on 27 March. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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