Elroy Nights
by By Barthelme, Frederick
Category: Fiction , General

Elroy Nights is a modestly successful and comfortably married 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, perhaps too comfortable with each other, decide to try living separately, a choice that is characteristic of their relationship - fond, thoughtful, generous to a fault, and more than a little cracked.So Elroy leases a high-rise beach condo and begins hanging out with his twenty-something students while Clare tends the home fires. Elroy hooks up with a patchy young woman from New Mexico, Freddie, a talented painter, Edward Works, and their friends, and experiences a splendid reenchantment with the world. But when an unforeseen tragedy throws his, and everyone's, infirmities into high relief, he's confronted with reordering, retracking - and reimagining - a world that seems to have suddenly gone haywire.