The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 February 2007
by James Atlas
This book is a memoir of one man's sojourn through middle age, the years between, say, 45 and 55, during which various life truths become evident and most pertinent. Atlas is the grandson of immigrants, raised in Chicago and now (as he puts it) a lower-upper-middle-class New Yorker, with an apartment in the City and a country house up in Vermont. He makes his living as a writer for such publications as The New Yorker and of such books as a biography of Saul Bellow. His life is pretty comfortable, by broad standards, but his concerns are perhaps quite widely recognizable to a reading public. He addresses his relative wealth in the introduction. What follows is a memoir that often reads like a New Yorker piece. It is enjoyable, and honest, not necessarily rife with personal confession or insight, but with a gentle recognition of one man's growing realization of life's lessons and its limits. With chapter titles like Mom and Dad, Time, Failure, The Body, and Death, we get a tour of anxiety and realization that the reader my find profoundly familiar. In the chapter Books, Atlas indulges a popular trend by authors and critics these days, the trend of confessing that one hasn't read all the way through the classic novels one pretends to be familiar with. This reader has seen this kind of thing before and finds this to be a bit of a cop-out. If you haven't read Proust, can you really say you have read Proust? The book is bracketed by two deaths, that of the author's father, and that of the author himself. These bookends give a certain dark feeling to the book, but are probably its most powerful pieces. If you can go far enough to relate to this writer, there is to be found here a certain comfort in a fellow traveler through time and the world, that we all, ultimately, face life's truths and consequences.