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

For many people today, disillusionment is the midlife plot: troubles compounded by losses and ending in despair. Margaret Morganroth Gullette uncovers in contemporary fiction an alternative plot, one in which adult protagonists are ultimately undaunted by their aging bodies, their inner weaknesses, their responsibility for their own lives, or the worst blows dealt them by fate. Using the works of Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike, Gullette reveals a genre that deals not with fear but with desire, the wide range of idiosyncratic midlife desires. She describes and analyzes a form of fiction that resists and revises the traditional narrative of midlife decline. ISBN 0-520-06282-5: $19.95.