This is a strange graphic novel. It is, as the title would suggest, about a man in the middle of his life. He's forty years old, once divorced and remarried, and has recently birthed a third child with his new wife, their first child. The mid-life crisis story is one that's been told a thousand or more times, but there is a genuine quality to the tale in Ollman's view of things, and it's clear that if this isn't largely biographical, that it at least draws many parallels to his own life.

The story itself follows a man named John and his struggles with the more mundane aspects of his life and the temptations he finds outside of it. I'm not sure it really goes beyond that, and any drama that exists is largely in his own head. The story also follows Sherri, a children's performer derivative of Raffi, who once had a promising star as an actual musician. The stories are related and eventually come together, but, much like in reality, very little actually comes of any of it. In the end, the feeling a reader is left with is one of stagnation almost. The problem posed here was that of middle age, but nothing was done about it. The value of a mid-life crisis in my eyes is that it gives a man or woman a chance to evaluate their options and to make changes, but neither character in this book does that, and to me a large part of telling a good story is showing how characters change. I suppose some will argue that they did change, and even if they didn't, the book ends too abruptly for them to change and so we don't really see if they could or did. Maybe that's true. I just didn't feel particularly satisfied with how everything stopped.

Regardless, worth a read, even if the art style is a little visually disgusting at times.