Will Blythe, “Men Behaving Oddly” (2009)

“Robert Cohen’s Amateur Barbarians raises the question of whether the novel of male midlife crisis is suffering a midlife crisis of its own. . .

“If we exempt from consideration the Dante of The Divine Comedy, who finds himself lost in dark woods and shortly thereafter enters the Inferno (this remains preferable to joining a men’s group), writers have been making narratives of midlife crisis since the ’60s, when an increasing level of economic prosperity and a loosening level of morality freed men to stare rapturously into their navels.” [. . .]    —The New York Times (July 16, 2009)