This is a book about how to be a middle-aged man without having a crisis. Or, in any case, without having a serious crisis. You might say that this is a book about how to deal with the many different crises that are the middle-aged male experience of life. Marcus Berkmann, a master of dry humour and excellent advice, says he once read an interview in which someone, possibly a member of the rock group Steely Dan, said that you don't have just one midlife crisis. You have one after another after another. Hair, eyes, teeth, ambition – all of these things waste away in middle age, and each is a crisis of its own.
I'd like to point out that this is a book about men. In middle age, men do not have the same crises as women, who face the loss of fertility, as well as the loss of female role models on the screen, leading to a sense, as several women have recently pointed out, that they are invisible. Men do not approach a clearly defined fault line such as the female menopause. Instead, they gradually crumble. Having nothing concrete to focus on, they sometimes go quietly mad. In middle age, they spot something on the horizon, and realise they're moving towards it, at what seems like an accelerating pace. It is death.
You might say that all of this book is about death, in one form or another. "Middle age," says Berkmann, "is when we truly know we're going to die." And then we have a "panic attack". What, we wonder, have we actually done with our lives? Good question. It's the very nub of the male midlife crisis. You see death coming, and you wonder how you let your life slip by without achieving all the stuff you wanted to achieve when you were young. Yes, says Berkmann. But this crisis is also a sort of opportunity. Now, with death approaching, you don't have to worry about little things, such as looking like an idiot in the eyes of others.
There's lots of thought-provoking material in here, and Berkmann can be very funny. He reminds us that, even though middle-aged people think they want to be young again, they might not if they could remember what being young actually felt like. All that anxiety, reflected through the prism of rank inexperience! Horrible at the time. What we actually want is to look young, while at the same time having the much more finely honed brain of a person in their middle years. That's why middle-aged people are so good at pub quizzes. Young people are more ignorant; old people are more forgetful. It's the middle-aged person who wins the prize.
Berkmann tries to work out the relationship between the passage of time, and the way the passage of time feels at different ages, mathematically. This is the theory of Decade Erosion, and it's to do with the gaps between the squares of certain numbers. "The years between the ages of four and nine feel as long as the years between nine and 16, and as those between 16 and 25, and 25 and 36, and 36 and 49." This really works. It's the sort of thing you might contemplate in your shed, if you were a middle-aged man, and if you had a shed.
William Leith is the author of The Hungry Years (Bloomsbury)
