In the early pages of Joyce Carol Oates's new novel, Middle Age, Adam Berendt dies in the Hudson river. He loses his life in a dark and humorous scene where someone else rescues the child he's trying to save. Not only that but Berendt suffers the fatal indignity of a heart attack and a fractured skull delivered by the rescue boat. And all on the fourth of July!
Adam Berendt's death is central to the events that follow but the river is the key to this book. Seen from afar, the Hudson shines and glimmers in the sun, its waters rolling beautifully through the countryside outside New York. Seen up close, those waters are dirty, choppy and unpredictable. Sink beneath them and you'll find all kinds of tragedies and losses in the uncertain dark.
Once Berendt dies, the community of his friends in Salthill-on-Hudson, apparently held together by his personality, takes quite a buffeting in his wake.
And this is Salthill-on-Hudson, "where marriage, families, property were sacrosanct and it was not the '70s". But those marriages are damaged, some irreparably; friendships are tested; property loses its appeal, and individuals surrender and discover strengths within themselves. Just like the Hudson, polite and wealthy society in Salthill has a dark undertow. Questions are asked, two above all. Who, precisely, was Adam Berendt and which Salthill women had affairs with him?
All of this might drag like sludge were it not for the lightness of Joyce Carol Oates's writing. Her characters may not be pleasant but they are entertaining and, as she brings them down to the river and scrubs them, we see a glint and a shimmer of the lives, real and pretend, of Berendt and his friends. Oates tosses us here a hint of flotsam, there a dark suggestion of jetsam. Sexual intrigue, incestuous flirtation, lawbreaking, cruelty, the occasional belly laugh and, always, the patient stripping away of the layers that make the middle-aged appear young.
And middle age is central to the story - or stories - in this book. Middle age, a time when dreams come face to face with mortality and the results are seldom satisfactory. Oates is wonderful in quietly assembling what, on the surface, appears as a homogenous group of middle-aged and wealthy people. But her sharp brilliance is to be found in their deconstruction.
At first the cracks appear but, as she flits backward and forward between the changing lives, these cracks become fractures and Adam Berendt begins to look like the fortunate one, the one who got away.
This isn't just a clever book by a clever writer. If that were all that were to it, Middle Age would have lost its power long before the end. Oates brings much more than cleverness to the book, she brings humanity and, with one or two small exceptions, credibility. And she brings beautiful writing. Whether it's in the imagery of "the sloping lawn that rises like a sharp green headache or the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamer trailing behind us" or the hopeless sense of loss Marina Troy feels for the dead Berendt or the darkly obnoxious adolescence of Jared Tierney, Oates is powerful.
Nor is the book simply a descent into darkness. Where paradise is lost a new one is gained. A man like Roger Cavanagh may discover that middle age need not be the end nor even the middle. The birth of his son "finds Roger hung over the white wicker crib, lost in awe. So happy, he was beginning to forget to be afraid". A man like Owen Cutler may find he can tell his returned wife, "a dream made me so happy, though when I was awake I hadn't much to be happy about" .
Take these people out of Salthill-on-Hudson, strip them of their wealth and remove their designer clothes and European cars and you're left with the darkly comic familiarity that is life. You're left, too, with a story told with a confidence that trusts in the reader's intelligence. But, most importantly, you're left with a book that's beautiful and angry and comic and sad but above and after all beautiful.
John MacKenna is a writer and broadcaster