Elroy Nights by Frederick Barthelme

...A professor of art, he loves his wife and his stepdaughter...

...Meanwhile, they collaborated on a gambling memoir...

...You're wearing an Eddie Bauer T-shirt and a wrist watch that cost as much as your first car...

...Though Freddy knows enough about guilt to decide she'd better get out of town on a more permanent basis, Elroy returns to his comfortable life oddly self-satisfied...

...Elroy's middle-aged identity crisis culminates (surprise, surprise) in that familiar younger-woman thing...

...His best student, Edward, moves into his apartment complex...

...He sings the praises of his long-suffering wife Clare, a mysterious figure with no novelistic life outside of Elroy's who now "roll[s] with the punch" despite his affair with "a woman the age of her child...

...The new novel, however, is strangely schizoid, challenging in its first half, tepid and lackadaisical in its second...

...Elroy pats himself on the back for their low-key enduring love, "a love not often achieved...

...I finished with the gas and capped the tank, returned the nozzle to the pump, and waited for my receipt...

...Elroy's nostalgic memories of his Catholic boyhood have been suspiciously romantic all along...

...These are not pretty passages...

...It is no wonder there has been a slight pause in his usual prodigious production rate: in the interim, he and his brother Steven were arrested for cheating in the casinos of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and survived a legal ordeal of nearly three years before the charges were dismissed...

...As he pursues Freddy, Elroy goes on and on about the attractions of lovely young skin...

...his stepdaughter's friend Freddy, a wise-cracking young woman who claims a life of abandonment and woe, finds him funny...

...He doesn't blame himself entirely, however: Edward's mother was recently decapitated in a car crash, and Freddy is doing plenty of suffering for the both of them...

...After this wait, and after the pleasures of Bob the Gambler, I wish I could report that Elroy Nights pushes deeper into difficult territory...

...In the old Barthelme novels, the brands would have been named, all right, but we would have had to infer the existential angst...

...Elroy is willing to articulate much of what has always been merely implied in Barthelme's depictions of privileged, frustrated, self-indulgent, white Southern professionals: "One day," he says, "you find yourself walking around in Ralph Lauren shorts and Cole Haan loafers, and no socks...

...he finds pleasure in his work...

...The two take off, with Elroy's stepdaughter (his surrogate conscience) and her newest boyfriend, on a road trip...

...The four travelers all speak the same interchangeable smart and/or cute, quick-beat dialogue, but not much happens around them...

...The novel's second half harks back to Barthelme's coolest, most detached impulses, and my response reached a similar temperature...

...Meanwhile, however, Freddy also has a thing going with Edward-an age-appropriate thing, with jealousy attached- and when Freddy begins spending more time at Elroy's, his neighbor Edward takes a suicidal plunge out of the apartment complex...

...His return home is even more disappointing...

...I'm willing to follow Elroy into his dark night of the soul, and instead I end up watching him in a wicker chair on his deck, "relishing the view...

...this ending, not even on the surface of things but hovering somewhere above, in the atmosphere of sophisticated regret, rings downright false...

...In the new Barthelme, the angst is right out there...

...Here's the kind of interlude that bored me to frustration: "I rolled my eyes and stuck a credit card in the slot of the gas pump, withdrew it, got the nozzle and started pumping gas...

...Spare me the view.pare me the view...

...A road trip to Texas, and we learn that Elroy pumps gas the same way everybody else does...

...Yech...

...For that book Barthelme heated up his famously cool, minimal, laissez-faire prose, the new style suggesting that his fiction might be headed in a new direction...

...They begin hanging out at his place...

...Clare, perhaps, should give Elroy the same good swift kick in the ass that the second half of this book needs...

...His relationships with both kids-and kids does seem the right word-intensify...

...and he has the Gulf Coast landscape to ponder when he is blue...

...Toward journey's end, Freddy is shot in the arm in a gas-station robbery, but the wound is slight and, even if she finally takes the physical as well as the metaphorical hit for Elroy, it is not a big deal in narrative terms...

...And Elroy is indeed the kind of troubled narrator who's not going to sleep deeply after the death of his young protege...

...If s a great beginning, one that promises to bring Elroy up on the kind of narrative charges middle-aged men who have slept with women half their ages don't usually have to face...

...You think, How did this happen...

...Elroy finds that he likes the solitude of marital separation but also becomes more interested in his students...

...But he and his wife have been drifting apart and decide, half-heartedly, to try living separately...

...The first half of the book, then, lays out the usual human mis-judgments and betrayals, and culminates in genuine sorrow...

...Aside from shifting light and new locales in which to explore the pleasures of Freddy's young flesh, the road from Memphis to Dallas does not offer many redemptive possibilities for Elroy, whose energy droops along with the narrative's...

...Elroy (he's a first-name kind of protagonist) is a man who should, theoretically speaking, be satisfied if not happy...

...The road trip, that staple of American fiction, is perhaps the wrong form for the cleansing Elroy seems to be seeking...

...Ironically enough, shortly before his arrest Barthelme published a disturbing and satisfying novel called Bob the Gambler, on the euphoria and terrors of the gaming tables...

...Though his themes have always been implicitly moral-he's made a career of pointing out the shallowness of American consumerism-his previous narratives, clever and detached in tone, often shied away from anything resembling moral engagement...