Description: Meet the Boomer. In sixth grade he ran for school president, and won. His best lunch was a fried egg. The boomer graduated from college with honors. He got a good job in a large company. He concentrated on priorities; he was quickly promoted. He married his girlfriend and honeymooned on a tropical island. They had a baby. They got a dog. At night when the boomer walked the dog he would see his neighbors staring at their television sets. Sometimes they would turn and wave to him. The boomer's wife remodeled the kitchen. They celebrated their anniversary in Europe. The boomer knew he led a privileged life, but sometimes, he wondered how bad he would feel if it were wiped out ...

Poignant, funny, and lastingly powerful, The Boomer is a deceptively succinct meditation on human finitude, on the hollowness lurking beneath the smooth surface of American life and dreams, and of the lost hopes, the rage, and the loneliness that overtook a generation as they reached mid-life. In a brilliantly fragmented form that echoes the book's themes -- the illusion of progress, the randomness of experience, the inexorable quickness of our lives and the arbitrary nature of what we remember of them -- Marty Asher has given us an everyman for our times: the boomer, a refreshingly unironic hero whose sorrow will be familiar to readers everywhere.

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