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My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale
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     James Atlas's My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale is a successful melding of heartfelt, profound emotion and narrative finesse. This should come as no surprise to those who know his work: Atlas, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair (among others), is also a noted biographer whose Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977) was nominated for a National Book Award.

    My Life in the Middle Ages is a compilation of essays by Atlas. In the opening essay, his father, a physician who "never seemed to have his heart in it," is stricken by what at first seems to be a stroke but turns out to be a brain abscess. The father is among the legion of friends, family, and other loved ones who fall victim to the rude winnowing of time, disability, and death. Atlas's handling of some of the most powerful and disturbing epochs of life is graceful and resigned yet humorous. He seems to meander through his childhood in Illinois — through an emotionally and intellectually rich family life and through the pangs of parenthood. He describes with aplomb the moment his son surpasses him on the tennis court: "The ball is past my racket before I even see it. . . . I trudge to the net, and we shake hands. `I'll get you next time,' I say. Will gives me a searching look. `Actually, not.'" Dozens of narrative moments like this one make the book compelling and powerful.

    I will not say that I couldn't put the book down. I had to put it down. Atlas provides a breather, and appeals to the intellectual appetite, when he describes in loving detail his favorite books and writers and his struggles to succeed at the pen. But the short list of milestones, and the leitmotiv — how to come to terms with a world that never stands still — gave this reader pause. Atlas is a master at capturing the nuance and joy, the pain of tiny as well as great moments. I am a doctor, a psychiatrist no less, and accustomed, I thought, to bouts of others' deep self-disclosure, pathos, and emotional pain. Yet this book cut through the professional carapace, the hard-won thick skin, like the proverbial hot knife through butter. The narrative is what one would hope for from a doctor's son. In the galaxy of physician-related writing, Atlas is no Louis-Ferdinand Céline; rather, William Carlos Williams comes to mind, and his capacity for sadness and termination articulated with a ponderous joy. There is a kindness to this spirit. Yet the book also invokes some of the deepest grief one can know, with reference to the recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner's prayer: no matter how tender the attachment, it too will pass.

    Atlas makes it abundantly clear that his relationship with his father was intense, painful, and filled with (ponderous) joy. Everything is bittersweet. Readers of this memoir are likely to agree: some of the most masterly strokes, whether of the pen or the racquet, are delivered with economy. For this reader, how Atlas will handle the next turn up ahead in life is of more than casual interest.

    David Brizer, M.D.

    Summit School

    Nyack, NY 10960

    dbrizer@aol.com(By James Atlas. 220 pp. N)