Elroy Nights

A generous and intimate novel from American literature's premier chronicler of middle-class angst in the new South.

In Elroy Nights, Frederick Barthelme does a fresh turn on territory he's made his own over the last two decades: a middle-class America studded with characters maybe a little more wised-up than not—cautious, skeptical, private folks who would rather joke about their problems than complain about them.

Elroy Nights is a reasonably successful artist and professor, fifty-something, ...