Elroy Nights

Elroy Nights is a reasonably successful artist and professor, fifty-something, who is caught between the midlife crisis of his forties and the eagerly anticipated sublime decay of his sixties. Elroy and his wife, Clare, elect to try living separately, a choice characteristic of their relationship-fond, thoughtful, generous to a fault, and more than a little cracked. So Elroy leases a high-rise beach condo, begins hanging out with his twenty-something students, and experiences a splendid reenchantment with the world. With his trademark precision and pitch-perfect dialogue, Barthelme elegantly lays open this interweaving of twenty-year olds with their fifty-something fellow traveler. The result is a lovely, lilting romance, and a spare yet generous masterpiece from a writer at the top of his form.