In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human? “Hilarious and mournful. [Oates’s] realism is laced with suspense, her mastery of storytelling on full display.” - Newsweek “A magnificent treat.… Middle Age is the work of a master in her prime.” - San Francisco Chronicle In Salthill-on-Hudson, a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, everyone is rich, beautiful, and -- though they look much younger -- middle-aged. But when Adam Berendt, a charismatic, mysterious sculptor, dies suddenly in a brash act of heroism, shock waves rock the town. But who was Adam Berendt? Was he in fact a hero, or someone more flawed and human? Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys ; Blonde , which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls , which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Middle Age A Romance By Oates, Joyce Carol Ecco Copyright ©2004 Joyce Oates All right reserved. ISBN: 0060934905 Survived By.. 1 How Death enters your life. A telephone ringing. And maybe you're still waiting for Adam Berendt to call. And maybe you're confused, your heart already pumping absurdly, when a stranger's voice utters the name Adam Berendt and you answer eagerly, hopefully. "Yes? I'm Marina Troy. What -- what is it?" That instant before fear strikes. Fear like a sliver of ice entering the heart. 2 Thwaite was the bearer of Adam Berendt's death. She would learn. An ugly name, isn't it? Though the child's name, Samantha, is beautiful. It was Thwaite that would stick in Marina's brain like a burr. Thwaite that became her obsession, she who would have defined herself as a woman free of obsession. A reasonable intelligent unemotional woman yet how Thwaite lodged in her brain as suffocation, choking, tar-tasting death. Thwaite Thwaite in her miserable sleep those nights following Adam's death. Sobbing aloud, furious: "If I'd been there with him on the boat, I wouldn't have let Adam die." In the derangement of grief Marina Troy quickly came to believe this. 3 Local TV News!How Adam would have been embarrassed, if, just maybe, secretly proud. Good Samaritan. Adam Berendt. Resident of Salthill-on-Hudson. July Fourth accident. Hudson River. Rescue of eight-year-old. Adam's face on the glassy screen: squinting his blind eye, smiling. That big head like something sculpted of coarse clay. A mere moment on the TV screen. Swift cut to the much younger Thwaites, parents of the rescued child. Thwaite. Harold and Janice. Jones Point residents. Devastated by. Tragic episode. So very sorry. So very grateful. Courageous man sacrificing his life for our daughter. Our Samantha. Our prayers will be with Adam Berendt. We are hoping to make contact with his family, his survivors. Oh, we hope ... Marina switched off the TV in disgust. How could she bear it, the banality of Adam as a "Good Samaritan." The banality of the Thwaites' emotion, how disappointingly ordinary they were, and young, stammering into microphones thrust into their dazed faces. "Well. I must learn to bear it. And more." She was an adult woman, she knew of loss, death. She was not a naive, self-pitying person. Her mother was chronically ill, and her father had died three years ago at the age of seventy-nine, so Marina knew, Marina knew what to expect from life, every chiché becomes painfully true in time, yet you survive until it's your turn: you don't become middle-aged without learning such primitive wisdom. Yet, when Marina's father had died, Marina had not been taken by surprise. That death had been not only expected, but "merciful." After cancer operations, and months of chemotherapy, the fading of Marina's father's life had been a slow fading of light into dusk and finally into dark. And there you are: death. Not like Adam's death. "Adam, God damn you. Why." She was desperate to recall the last time they'd spoken. She shut her eyes, rubbing her eyes with the palms of her hands: Adam's face! A doctor at the Jones Point Medical Center had prescribed a sedative for Marina Troy. (Did that mean she'd become hysterical? She'd lost all dignity, and collapsed?) Next morning staggering from her bed that was like a grave, at the top of her