Middle America has an unofficial theme for 40th birthdays – or perhaps I should say had; the affectivity of ageing in that country has undergone considerable revision of late. Anniversaries, of course, still get the gemstones, all that porphyry and luster. And for a few blissful years of childhood, birthday thematics are dealer’s choice. (For years I insisted on Scooby-Doo. That’s the joy of a birthday – you decide the colour of life for a day. What a gift.) But 40, in the flatlands and lake states at least, is chosen for you, in a really excellent display of that plucky old-fashioned morbidity for which the Midwest got famous. “Over the Hill,” they call it there.

ELISION Ensemble performing in July 2024. Photo © Lauren Murphy

The implication, of course, is that one’s star – and, perhaps, one’s body too – is only on the ascent for the first four decades; everything thereafter trends down. With the best years of your life squarely in the rearview mirror, the long descent begins, a mingled exercise in nostalgia and time-biding, grumpiness and joint pain. Forty is, in the Middle American mind, the last...