Age discrimination, youth culture, and midlife in Richard B. Wright’s <i>In the Middle of a Life</i>

This article approaches Canadian author Richard B. Wright’s 1973 novel In the Middle of a Life through the lens of critical age studies and offers a close reading of the text as a fictional engagement with the North American conversation about age discrimination in employment, a problem that the novel links to a wider cultural middle-ageism exacerbated by the rise of 1960s youth culture. Situating its 42-year-old protagonist’s struggles with finding work and with maintaining a relationship with his teenaged daughter in relation to nationalist anxieties about American cultural and economic imperialism, the novel reflects the ambivalence that characterised American debates about how age discrimination should be conceptualised and dealt with. At the same time, the novel attempts to imagine Canada as a space of intergenerational interdependence where the rights of older workers might be protected at a time when the political conversation about age discrimination in Canada was relatively undeveloped.