One well-known genre is the coming-of-age novel, represented perhaps most famously by J.D. Salinger's classic, Catcher in the Rye. The opposite might be called the fading-away novel, here represented by Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending.
First published in 2011, it won the coveted Man Booker Prize, but I just got around to reading it, and wasn't planning to write anything about it until I took a course from the Seattle Opera in how to write a libretto.
The connection is that according to my instructor, a good aria, or the story underlying a sequence of continuous music (the more contemporary format), needs to have a twist in it. Just when you think one thing is happening, it turns out to be something else.
The Sense of an Ending is a book with a dramatic twist (which I will not reveal in case you want to read it) and it causes the protagonist, Tony Webster, then in his sixties, to reevaluate a significant part of his life. What does it mean when the life you thought you lived wasn't the life you actually lived? When you thought you did one thing only to discover you did something different?
"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else; the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?" That's what Webster asks himself as the story ends and one wonders how many other people have, too, as they neared the end of their lives.
If you want to know more about what sort of a book this is, the verso of the title page lists the following tags: middle-aged men, male friendship, life change events and psychological fiction.
It's not a long book -- almost more a novella -- and worth reading.
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