When the staying gets tough, the staid get going

FRIEND, are you feeling the telltale symptoms of a midlife crisis? If that’s your problem, friend, better scoot out and pick up a copy of Frederick Barthelme’s bleakly funny, unflinchingly confessional new novel, “Elroy Nights.� Remember, forewarned is forearmed.

So, is this where a guy starts behaving badly? “As days wore on

Or does unease start with an empty nest? “When Winter hit eighteen she moved out, got an apartment with one of her dodgier friends, and left us at the house with the dog, Wavy.... Clare and I weren’t used to spending so much time together.�Or did Elroy’s impulse to transgress, to liberate his repressed libido at a stroke before midnight, have roots of a sort endemic to middle-class America? “Things change. What you want becomes something you can’t imagine having wanted.... One day you find yourself walking around in Ralph Lauren shorts and Cole Haan loafers ... and a wristwatch that cost as much as your first car.� Shades of the Talking Heads’ anthem to anomie, “Once in a Lifetime.� Other pop tunes flit through Elroy’s nights. For example, his first fumbling approach to Winter’s new girl-pal, who is “young and handsome in that weathered way [of] women who’ve had some tough sledding,� takes place at a car wash usually crowded with “young, happy folk getting their BMW’s cleaned a mile a minute.� Surely a pitch-perfect echo of Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do� riff on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Elroy craves youth. Somehow it was grabbed from him when he wasn’t looking, while he was missing chances and messing up. Or even before, because a golden age ended with the loss of his parents. “Everyone was more generous then.... I was this kid in this little spaceship my parents made.� Under Professor E’s facade of aimlessness writhes a ferocious angst. If he can’t regain youth -- by holding a sort of art student salon in his condo, or by casting Clare as the serene adult to his moody child -- he’ll simply ingest it. Transcendent sex with his “weathered� 22-year-old student Freddie on the dusty floor of his office leads not to self-torturing guilt, nor, happily, to today’s de rigueur campus tarring and feathering, but rather to an “On the Road� escape. It’s first to Memphis, then to Dallas, Elroy at the wheel while Freddie, Winter and her goofy new beau provide hormonal passenger ballast. When violence erupts in this American idyll, it encircles the characters like a flash flood -- as in life, with no warning.

The many fans of Barthelme -- a consummate stylist -- will recognize here, beyond the cheerful hat-doffing to fellow artists, much of the same situational material and themes distilled in his last novel, “Bob the Gambler,� and in earlier works. Elroy, in fact, resembles Bob with a switch of addictions. Has the author dittoed himself once too often? All fiction writers must mine their own lives to some degree. Those who soar furthest from the dictatorial facts can be dazzling, exhilarating -- Nabokov, say, or Margaret Atwood. But often it’s those who mine their own subjective experience who deliver that eventual shiver of recognition, a part of oneself laid bare.

As Elroy says, having dug to the bottom of the heap of his regrets, pulling to light nasty and nastier sins: The message was “something about other people, wasn’t it? ... That they counted.... There was something wholesome and terrifying about what [we] shared

So where does Elroy’s night road finish? Surely not on the half-finished highway ramp where he and Freddie dangled their legs over the abyss. Probably not on Clare’s porch, which he visits after midnight, musing, keeping guard over loves of the past. Whether any guy’s prospect toward journey’s end looks good or bad may depend on how high his hopes were setting out.