Safe at Last in the Middle Years The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike

Discovering the midlife progress novel, Gullette finds in recent fiction a pervasive tension between decline and a new ideology of aging. “Appropriately, she invites the reader to join the writers in their ‘therapeutic discourse.’”—Rosemary Franklin, American Literature “[This] book certainly makes you think. What is it that can happen in middle age to make it—as it is for many people—the cearest and sweetest time of life?”—Frank Conroy, New York Times