Boomer at Midlife

Bold and bittersweet, a tragedy wrapped in a comedy. You can read it and laugh, or weep, but always with the shock of recognition.—Landon Y. Jones, best-selling author and National Book Award nominee for Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation

Walter "Boomer" Stapleton has good reason to believe that he is the ultimate stereotype: divorced, middle-aged, tired of his job, involved with a much younger woman, and soon to lose his only child to college. He is a Baby Boomer, one of an anonymous seventy-seven million Americans at or approaching midlife. With his fiftieth birthday just around the corner, Boomer is finished being a poster child for his generation and determined to forge a new path despite his progressively shrinking set of life options. He quits his job and leaves friends and family behind to move to New Orleans to play zydeco on his accordion. But what he encounters in The Big Easy leads him even deeper into the realm of uncertainty about who he is and where he really belongs.

From the halls of corporate America to the sidewalks and clubs of New Orleans, Boomer at Midlife lampoons the self-conscious Baby Boomers in a story that is at once comic, nostalgic, and melancholy.

©2007 Mark Cain (P)2025 Mark Cain

Such a Good Read!

Love the humor and relatability in this story. Entertaining, whimsical, over too soon. The narration was excellent, a familiar voice, possibly the narrator of the wonderful “Hell’s Super” series. Hope there will be a sequel, have to see what happens next with Boomer!