What I’d Like to Read: Novels with Older Main Characters

Perhaps novels have always centered on main characters in their childhoods and early adulthoods, and I’ve only noticed it recently.

I love books about children, teenagers, and young adults. People at these ages are full of uncertainty and change and choice. Read enough of books about them, though, and the stories start to have the same flavor. Sure, change the setting and the culture and the background of the characters and it takes a different form and nuance. You add new challenges, interest, angles.

However, by and large, stories about children and people below, say, age thirty all share the overarching how-do-I-get-past-youth themes in common. You know the themes: How do I navigate school and friendships and first loves, how do I leave the parental nest, where do I find a career path, how do I navigate my early work life, how do I decide whether or who to marry, how do I choose whether to have children, how will I get through the experience of new parenthood, how can I survive parenting young children? And variations.

All of us going through it and who have gone through it can identify.

I read a lot, though. And I’d like to encounter more characters in my reading life going through different life stages and places. I want to experience the growth and choices and changes and challenges of people aged forty and above.

People older than forty also face uncertainty and change and choice and drama and challenge. They struggle. They experience and encounter and grow, too.

You can “come of age” at any age.

I want to read more often about people who’ve passed into full-on adulthood. People who’ve gone through the stages after childhood and youth and their twenties. I’ve passed these stages, and I want to read more about people who’ve gone further in life than what I tend to find. And I want to read about people who’ve gone through life stages I haven’t yet, for their perspective, insights, and understanding.

What themes could novels about people past forty explore? Suffering the judgement (and treatment) of teen and young-adult children, parenting teens and taking care of elderly parents at the same time, experiencing an empty nest as a single parent or as a married or coupled one, menopause and midlife crises, the sadness and the freedom of losing attractiveness and interest per predominant standards of human value, dating after age fifty, career and work life in middle age and later, retirement, getting through the death of a spouse after a natural life span (not a “stricken down too young” sort of death), receiving health news that you don’t expect to see improve or heal, living at home with reduced mobility and capability, moving to and living in a retirement community, a person advanced in age experiencing and caretaking for a declining partner, navigating relationships with children in their middle age, going through the successive deaths of your friends and peers, feeling the approach of the end of your natural life and deciding how to spend it in the best way for you and for the people you love. Not to mention the perspectives of these life-experienced people on the world and society.

Should I go on?

Although I’ve embarked on my fiction-writing path more seriously recently, I haven’t recently taken on a subject featuring a character or cast of main characters aged past their midthirties. (Exception being a short story of mine published earlier this year, one I wrote ages ago and only lately revised.) Though I’ll finish what I’ve started with my current works in progress, I’ve often heard that writers should write the books they want to read. Got it. Writing about what I’ve started to call “grown-ass adults” ahead.

When I have encountered novels lately that feature central characters in their forties and above—including Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point, Idra Novey’s Take What You Need, and Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook (an older book only recently translated)—I feel a frisson of excitement. These stories feel new. Interesting. Different. I want more from these eyes and perspectives and experiences.

I have no control over the publishing industry—if I did, oh, what I would do—though I’ll put into the universe a call for more books by and about people who’ve at least reached “middle age.”

Over and over again, I read and hear that almost no one gets a novel published for the first time after age forty. If true (and my independent research tells me that it is, at least as of today), we can’t wonder why we don’t get stories with main characters at or above “middle age.” After all, none of the writers publishing today have experienced anything past forty. How can they astutely address themes beyond it?

I’ve also heard that books featuring main characters older than their midthirties don’t really interest publishers, either. The why, I don’t fully understand. Depressing. Frustratingly limiting. Small-minded, even.

I’ll put out into the ether as well, for anyone who happens to read this far, a request for recommendations of novels that you’ve read and loved that feature “grown-ass adults” as main characters. Ideas?