Matthew Shipe’s essay, “Middle-Age Crazy: Men Behaving Badly in the Fiction of Raymond Carver and John Updike,” appears in the recently published Critical Insights: Raymond Carver, edited by James Plath. Shipe compares the fiction of two writers whose creative and personal lives couldn’t be more different. Yet, Carver and Updike, whose New Yorker background and stories reflect a life that’s more privileged, find a point of intersection in that their male characters tend to behave badly—especially in relation to the women in their lives and in matters of responsibility. Characters often give in to their impulses, putting themselves first no matter how much they seem to care about the others in their lives.

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