Boomer lit is fiction aimed at readers, women mostly, in their 40s, 50s, and 60's. The stories comprehend conflicts that alter Boomers-aging parents, vitality woes, retirement, health issues, where-the-hell-did-my-life-go, and ace old-fashioned loneliness. The ace of boomer lit involves a beefy potion of self-assessment.
Recent boomer lit titles add The Botox Diaries, by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger, A Contemporary Lu by Laura Castoro, Younger by Pamela Redmond Satran, and The Feverish Light Club by Nancy Thayer. Some critics keep called the genus chick lit for the AARP crowd. Thayer's spirited novel, for example, is approximately a chance company at a cocktail ball that brings four Boston-area women in their 50s and 60s well-adjusted and who adjacent comply to bond for life.
But (and this is a colossal but), boomer lit doesn't retain to be 300-page women's relieve group. Boomer lit doesn't admit to be about feminine bonding, getting the guy, makeovers, suburban shopping sprees, or other comical feminine theatrics. In other words, Boomer lit doesn't corner to be shallow. The choicest boomer lit is about the human condition-human emotions, values and beliefs. It's about the search for meaning. The alike search for bottom line that literary fiction has been struggling with for decades.
Pete Dexter's Original Novel, Train
Pete Dexter's recent tale Train is a beneficial example. (Note, once this article hits the Web, I'll be on the lookout for Dexter to sneak up persist me and endeavor to slit my throat for referring to Train as anything on the contrary literary fiction.) Pete Dexter sets this quota of fiction noir in a Los Angeles of the 1950s. A superb novel, it brings stable a livid caddy, a police detective, and Norah Still, the solitary survivor of a bloody boat hijacking. State Jotter Award winner, Pete Dexter's album is about anxiety and loss: the men and women who deliver the blows and how these characters bear on.
If you could simplify any bulky boomer lit narrative to a unmarried subject or controlling idea, it's this: self assessment. Boomer lit is the mature story of the time to come of hour novel. It's about captivating a acceptable tough gander at your life, sifting washed-up the fodder stack of fourty caducity of "issues" and "opportunities" (Boomer law text for screw-ups and worthier screw ups), and deciding where to animation from here.
In Pete Dexter's Train, these issues are irreversible. Norah Still, one of the novel's most compelling characters, tries to rebuild her duration after an attempted boat hijacking in which her spouse is murdered and she is raped. Dexter is scarcely politically right and always unafraid to treasure trove pettiness in the lives of his characters. He is no less unsympathetic of Norah. Even in Norah Still, we gem a mature emotions we genuinely burden for, troubles and all. At the duplicate time, we spot that there are no elementary answers. Train is boomer lit at its best.
Novels by Pete Dexter:  God's Pocket (1984)  Deadwood (1986)  Paris Trout (1988) (1988 Public Volume Award for Fiction)  Brotherly Case (1991)  The Paperboy (1995) (1996 Literary Award, PEN Centre USA)  Train (2003)