BOOMER LIT: THE LITERATURE OF SELF-ASSESSMENT
by Latham Shinder

oomer lit is fiction aimed at readers, women mostly, in their 40s, 50s, and 60's. The stories revolve around conflicts that affect Boomers—aging parents, career woes, retirement, health issues, where-the-hell-did-my-life-go, and good old-fashioned loneliness. The best of boomer lit involves a strong dose of self-assessment.

Recent boomer lit titles include The Botox Diaries, by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger, A New Lu by Laura Castoro, Younger by Pamela Redmond Satran, One Little Secret by Allison Bottke, and The Hot Flash Club by Nancy Thayer. Some critics have called the genre chick lit for the AARP crowd. Thayer's spirited novel, for example, is about a chance meeting at a cocktail party that brings four Boston-area women in their 50s and 60s together and who later agree to bond for life.

But (and this is a big but), boomer lit doesn't have to be 300-page women's support group. Boomer lit doesn't have to be about feminine bonding, getting the guy, makeovers, suburban shopping sprees, or other humorous feminine theatrics. In other words, boomer lit doesn't have to be shallow. The best boomer lit is about the human condition—human emotions, values and beliefs. It's about the search for meaning. The same search for meaning that literary fiction has been struggling with for decades.

Pete Dexter's latest novel Train is a good example. (Note, once this article hits the Web, I'll be on the lookout for Dexter to sneak up behind me and try to slit my throat for referring to Train as anything but literary fiction.) Pete Dexter sets this piece of fiction noir in a Los Angeles of the 1950s. A superb novel, it brings together a black caddy, a police detective, and Norah Still, the only survivor of a bloody boat hijacking. National Book Award winner, Pete Dexter's book is about pain and loss: the men and women who deliver the blows and how these characters carry on.

If you could simplify any great boomer lit novel to a single theme or controlling idea, it's this: self assessment. Boomer lit is the mature version of the coming of age novel. It's about taking a good hard look at your life, sifting through the hay stack of forty years of “issues” and “opportunities” (Boomer code words for screw-ups and bigger screw ups), and deciding where to go from here.

In Pete Dexter's Train, these issues are irreversible. Norah Still, one of the novel's most compelling characters, tries to rebuild her life after an attempted boat hijacking in which her husband is murdered and she is raped. Dexter is rarely politically correct and always unafraid to find pettiness in the lives of his characters. He is no less unsympathetic of Norah. Yet in Norah Still, we find a mature character we genuinely care for, troubles and all. At the same time, we recognize that there are no easy answers. Train is boomer lit at its best.

Novels by Pete Dexter: