The Women’s Midlife-Crisis Novel Enters the Season of the Witch

What does a woman in midlife want? The opening scene of Susan Minot’s new novel, “Don’t Be a Stranger,” hazards an answer. Ivy—a writer, early fifties, divorced, devoted mother of a young son—is alone in her West Village apartment, soaking in the tub, when the doorbell rings. She wraps herself in a towel and pads down the hall to greet her visitor, a thirtysomething musician whose handsomeness “gave her a jolt.” “I’m early,” he says. They exchange kisses on the cheek. The scene momentarily evokes the opening of Patrice Chéreau’s 2001 film, “Intimacy,” a graphic account of anonymous sex-by-appointment, in which one partner shows up unscheduled at the other’s doorstep (first line: “Was this agreed?”), and, next thing you know, they’re thrashing around on the floor, where they will remain for a half-hour or so of real-time fucking.

Minot will get to this later—as it turns out, her novel’s first scene is something of an erotic fakeout. The musician, Ansel Fleming (Ivy typically refers to him by his full name, like Charlie Brown), has come not for an assignation but, rather, for a sort of blind date. He is a vaguely Ryan Adams-ish troubadour who has recently completed seven years in prison for a nonviolent drug offense, a misfortune that enhances his sullen allure; he wears a man bun, but broodingly. He and Ivy do eventually have lots of sex, and Minot, working in the close third, offers us Ivy’s play-by-play of the action. They kiss: “One’s face got this close to not a lot of people.” Ansel puts Ivy’s hand on his crotch: “Lord God, she thought, where am I? Fuck, she thought, who cares?” Ivy chastises herself for overanalyzing her entanglements with Ansel: “Why did a person need to think about what it was or wasn’t or would be? Couldn’t she just let it wash over her for once?”

This tension between self-abandonment and self-interrogation, between the rapturous present and the apprehension of some future consequence, is familiar from other novels about middle-aged women pursuing affairs with younger men. These include the literary sensation of the summer, Miranda July’s “All Fours”—“the First Great Perimenopause Novel,” per the Times Magazine—as well as multiple works by the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, whose latest contribution to the canon, “The Young Man,” appeared in English a year ago. (I’m leaving out Sally Rooney’s recent “Intermezzo,” in which the older woman is only thirty-six and likely some years off from the climacteric.) Ernaux, in fact, is perhaps the patron saint of this genre. In “Simple Passion,” from 1991, the narrator declares (in Tanya Leslie’s translation), “I do not wish to explain my passion—that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.” Daydreaming about her younger lover, she says, “I felt I was giving in to physical pleasure, as if the brain, exposed to a repeated flow of the same images and memories, could achieve an orgasm, becoming a sexual organ like the others.” But, when the man is actually with her, she is tormented by the clock, by the imminent moment when he leaves. “Astonished, I asked myself: ‘Where is the present?’ ”

In “All Fours,” it’s easier for the unnamed forty-five-year-old narrator to surrender to a flow state of perpetual foreplay with her married lover, Davey, and yet July’s sex scenes are minutely observant and, like sex itself, often quite funny. (When introduced to Davey’s “huge cock,” the narrator finds it “quite sobering. I was moved. I wanted to genuflect and kiss it, or heartily shake his hand in warm and sincere appreciation.”) July shares Ernaux’s instinct to describe-not-explain. The heroine of “All Fours” learns why she does things by doing them; her sexual adventures are, she says, “guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before,” and her exact motivations are vividly obscure. (“Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.”)

Ernaux’s and July’s writerly personae are highly distinct: July’s stand-in is the game workaholic who mines material from discomfort; Ernaux is the haughty yet abject sex freak whom Isabelle Huppert would play in the movie. But they both take the ecstatic fusion of brain and body, of intellect and sex drive, as a given. Mirror neurons are firing between these big shuddering brains. Minot is picking up a different frequency in “Don’t Be a Stranger,” wherein Ivy wants to explain what is happening to her, finds she cannot, and throws up her hands: “Okay, so she was a cliché of postcoital bliss. She’d take it.” The uncertainty and self-consciousness that pervade Minot’s novel are likely truer to more women’s experiences of later-in-life sex and relationships, but this makes for less satisfying, less transporting art.

A parallel (though much weirder) ambivalence is present in Julia May Jonas’s “Vladimir,” from 2022, in which the narrator, an unnamed English professor in her fifties, goes to fiendish extremes to consummate her obsession with the strapping title character: drugging his drink, breaking out the zip ties. Yet when Vladimir shows himself to be an at least somewhat willing co-conspirator in her sex plot, she hits a wall of irresolution—and when she loses her nerve, the novel does, too. “For the first time in what felt like my life,” she muses, “I was getting exactly what I wanted, what I had fantasized and dreamed about, and I was reacting like a frigid spinster.” She freezes up, she explains, because Vladimir’s attraction to her is of the wrong kind: it “belonged to a taxonomy that placed me in the category of pervy older-woman teacher and him in the category of a fresh-faced, innocent youth. I was a camp act for him.”

It is not enough to be wanted, it seems; one has to be wanted in the way one wants. When the reader first meets Vladimir, he is asleep and shackled to a chair, and the narrator is gazing on his supple form as a succubus might. Her paradox is that she can play-act a more rapacious, demonic version of herself, but only so long as nobody, not even the object of her affection, is really looking—so long as she’s alone.

“Vladimir,” like “All Fours” and “Don’t Be a Stranger,” is also a novel of uncoupling, the toils of motherhood, and the guilt, resentment, and score-settling native to the heterosexual, creative-class, two-income-one-child family, in which the woman shoulders a disproportionate burden of (in July’s words) “the endless cleaning and cooking and caring.” Significant passages of each book are built on the same double helix of desire: one strand is for wild sex with a person or persons not one’s partner; and the other is for solitude, privacy, unbroken concentration. These desires cannot be fulfilled at the same time, of course, but, under the right circumstances, they can be mutually reinforcing and generative. (The narrator of “Vladimir” confesses that, after being in the aphrodisiac presence of the title character, “I was struck with an urge I hadn’t felt, not truly, in years. The urge, the want, felt almost orgasmic . . . . It was the real and true urge to write.”) These women do not wish to abjure their domestic responsibilities entirely (as, say, Leda does in Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter,” from 2006). Rather, to be occasionally alone and free from demands—a part-time art monster, as perfectly undisturbed as Philip Roth in his cabin—is a means of fallowing the land, allowing the soil of eros and care and creativity and motherhood to replenish itself.

In short, these women want a room of one’s own, and they want to have a lot of sex in it. The animating conceit in “All Fours” is that the narrator is supposed to be on a cross-country drive, but is instead hiding from her husband and child in a motel room in a nearby town. She hires an interior designer to redecorate the room; there, she orchestrates euphoric sexual encounters with Davey, who happens to be the interior designer’s husband. “What a relief it was,” she thinks, “to not have to tiptoe into the house but just swing open the door of my perfect room, throw the key onto the floor, pee loudly, drink from the tap.” In Sarah Manguso’s recent “Liars,” the narrator, Jane, an unhappy wife and the mother of a young son, hungers for what she calls “uncontaminated time.” While housesitting in upstate New York, she fantasizes that she owns the house outright and lives in it alone: “I pretended I was fifty years old and had published many books translated into many languages. I imagined seducing the beautiful young men who installed satellite dishes and fixed cars and lived in my neighbors’ converted stables.”

It’s telling that, in Jane’s fantasy, her randy future self has already written the books, presumably during the years that actual-Jane was cleaning and cooking. All of these novels buzz with nervous exhaustion—their protagonists, depleted by day-to-day caregiving tasks, feel acutely that they are running out of time and all its gifts (collagen, estrogen, good ideas). “All Fours” makes fun of its narrator for how she projects her anxieties about aging onto older women, who baffle and disgust her. “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly,” she says, of a lady with whom she later has amazing sex. In the gynecologist’s waiting room, she sees a woman in her seventies and cannot imagine “what was going on between her legs, though I tried and saw gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of their balls. How did it feel to still be dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare?” When, by chance, the narrator meets Davey’s mother, she wonders about the “terrible power” she wields over her son: “Who was she? A witch?”

And there it is. These authors don’t play much with witchy tropes, although the credulous and compliant Vladimir does seem to be under some sort of spell, and “All Fours” briefly imagines a spontaneous nighttime gathering of wives in a field which resembles an aborted Black Sabbath. Still, the bubbly brew is in the groundwater. The vapors drift in the air around us. It’s hard to read a raft of books exploring the social role of older women and not be reminded that the fate of our democratic Republic has been placed on the shoulders of a woman at the end of her fifties. Her opponent, our once and perhaps future President, loves to say “LOCK HER UP!” and “WITCH HUNT!”—because he thinks of himself as the unjustly accused witch, of course, but also because a witch hunt is the kind of sport he’d most enjoy. His running mate once appeared to agree with an interviewer who said that caring for grandchildren is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory”; he is at one with the misogyny of the manosphere and its revulsion for “childless cat ladies.” Our body politic, like each of the books under discussion here, is subject to the same gravitational pull of feminine obsolescence, the uneasiness that swirls like dry autumn leaves around a woman past her childbearing years, the suspicion that anything she may possess of intellectual or economic or sexual potency somehow perverts the natural order of things, but so does any lack thereof. She floats or she drowns. (Most of the fourteen women executed at Salem were in their fifties or older; the youngest were thirty-nine.) These are notions as ancient as the tides; they are the moon that’s always full.

Nearly a century ago, Sylvia Townsend Warner published one of the greatest of all novels about a woman who transcends the impasse of midlife. In “Lolly Willowes,” a late-fortysomething Englishwoman, Laura, spends decades as an unpaid caregiver and domestic servant to various family members in London. She finally flees to her own place in the countryside, but her nephew follows her, disturbing her newfound peace and autonomy: “She had thrown away twenty years of her life like a handful of old rags, but the wind had blown them back again, and dressed her in the old uniform.” In exchange for her freedom, and in something like a trance, Laura makes a compact with the devil, one that is notarized “with the round red seal of her blood.” The blood is procured when a stray kitten scratches her, becoming her familiar—the witch and the childless cat lady are one and the same.