I’m not having a midlife crisis. I mean it. Every one of us is entitled to one birthday freakout, one milestone where we get a free pass to express angst about the passing of our youth and reflect in maudlin fashion over the list of reckless and self-destructive behaviors we can no longer get away with. One is all we’re allowed, the limit of what we can be forgiven for. I decided that to have my freakout at 40 would be a horrid cliché, so I went ahead and did it at 30, and as expected, I pretty much made an ass of myself. Now I’m settled into my 40s and perfectly comfortable with it, so I made the right choice, I think, even if I do still have the occasional reckless and self-destructive evening (I do live in Athens, after all).

Socrates famously wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and this installment is all about examined lives, expressed through two thoughtful new works of fiction.

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Vicariously Through…: For those of you who don’t know Paul Auster, he’s the acclaimed author of such intelligent and challenging novels as The Book of Illusions and Leviathan, a specialist in blurring distinctions between the fantastic and the real, with pleasing results. For those of you who do know Auster, he has a new book. It’s called Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, 2008). Go buy it.

Auster’s novel takes place in a house full of the wounded, inside and out. August Brill, a Pulitzer-winning book critic edging toward the end of his life, nurses a shattered leg, raging insomnia and a widower’s grief, sharing space with his daughter Miriam, a historian still recovering from her husband’s abandonment, and his granddaughter Katya, a film student retreating from the world after losing her boyfriend in Iraq. They move among each other like shadows, the remnants of a brilliant and creative family all living through other people’s lives in books and films, too raw to be of much help to each other but doing the best they can.

August tries to fill the endlessly stretching hours of sleepless nights by telling himself stories, and his current story is a particularly good one. He starts with a man waking up in a deep hole, dressed in the uniform of a strange army. He’s rescued by his sergeant, who informs him that he’s been drafted for a mysterious mission. As the new recruit makes his way through an America blasted and ravaged by civil war, one in which 9/11 never happened but George W. Bush did, his mission becomes clear - the war is entirely the invention of a lonely old man telling himself a story, and the new recruit has no choice but to find and kill him.

The story-within-a-story conceit has been used many times before, and while it is often clumsy and obvious in its Twilight Zone-ish way, in the right hands it can be very well done. Auster’s hands are the right ones, and while he’s been compared to Philip K. Dick in his Mobius-strip approach, in this novel he seems to be closer to Vonnegut country. August’s story is the center of this novel, but it’s not the point. As August is amusing himself, he is also coming to terms with his own life and losses, a career spent living through others’ words, and the very real and immediate needs of the people he still has. Auster’s novel covers great films, the twisted state of modern politics, the tragedy of pointless heroics, and the seductive power of living vicariously, but ultimately it is about our need to face ourselves and live our own stories, however messy they may be.

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The Dirty ’50s South: While Clyde Edgerton rides an entirely different circuit than Paul Auster, a new novel by Edgerton is no less an event. Edgerton, the author of such very good Southern novels as Raney and Walking Across Egypt, takes us on a ride through the postwar Carolinas and Georgia in The Bible Salesman (Little Brown, 2008), a short but cinematic novel about small-time crooks and life at the crossroads of the 20th century.

In 1950, Preston Clearwater is a car thief working his way slowly toward the big time. Once he does a requisite couple of years at the bottom tier of his Army buddy’s criminal ring, he can move up to bigger scores, his brusque charm and striking resemblance to Clark Gable greasing the wheels. What he needs at the moment, however, is an unwitting accomplice. Enter Henry Dampier, a feckless 20-year-old setting out on his own as a traveling Bible salesman. After giving Henry a lift, Clearwater convinces him that he is an honest-to-Hoover G-man working undercover to bust an interstate auto-theft ring. Henry agrees to travel with Clearwater, driving the cars Clearwater steals while Clearwater follows at a safe distance. It seems like a sweet deal - Henry gets paid for supposedly helping the FBI and selling a few Bibles on the side, and Clearwater gets just the patsy he needs.

The deal isn’t entirely rosy, however, as Henry is not exactly who he seems, either. The Bibles Henry sells are books he’s scammed from religious organizations and then razored out the pages with their names on them. And while Henry does have that trusting nature Clearwater needs, he is familiar with the moral lapses of others, as Edgerton illustrates in a series of flashbacks to Henry’s Depression-era childhood marked by family tragedies, deaths and abandonments, and a growing awareness of the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Henry’s eyes may be wide and eager, but as the novel progresses we find he is not quite as naïve as Edgerton would have us, or Clearwater, believe.

Edgerton’s book is by turns tragic and funny - a scene where Henry has to bury and re-bury a potential customer’s dead cat is particularly good - as it builds toward its suspenseful climax. Moreover, it demonstrates a quality that few proponents of the Southern novel seem to be able to achieve: it doesn’t get bogged down by Southern-ness, the gratuitous rural eccentricities in lieu of actual characterization that so many lazy authors tend to use to prop up their books set below the Masie-Dixie. Edgerton’s characters breathe during their brief time in our view, and while the novel could use some trimming in places and expanding in others, all in all it’s worth the price of admission to watch it go.

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The News in Good Magazines: And since the human mind craves order and will find a pattern in any seemingly random sequence even if it has to force one, here’s my best transition yet. After discussing a novel about characters suffering from depression, and one partially set during the Great Depression, it’s my pleasure to talk about the future of the magazine No Depression (ha!). For years one of the best music magazines out there, covering the realm of alt-country/Americana/all those artists like Lyle Lovett and Buddy Miller and Son Volt who don’t fit into anyone’s radio format, No Depression shut down as a print publication a few months ago, causing lamentations throughout the land. (I don’t actually know about lamentations, but it was a damn good magazine.) According to its website, however, there’s new hope for the magazine’s fans. Much like The Oxford American, No Depression is returning this fall through a partnership with a university press, in this case the University of Texas, which will be putting the mag in “bookazine” format (think Granta or The Paris Review). This means less frequent publication but more content per issue.

And we get more No Depression in print which, I’m sorry, is always better than reading online. I prefer to have my reading material in my hands, with pages I can turn with my fingers. So sue me. We old people are like that.

John G. Nettles