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"Middle-class malaise" is a literary category that explores the quiet, simmering dissatisfaction of characters who have achieved conventional stability—steady jobs, mortgages, families—but find their lives flattened by routine, unmet desires, and the gap between aspiration and reality. These books typically focus on domestic settings (suburbs, commuter towns, office blocks) and center on interiority: stalled careers, failing marriages, subtle alienation, consumerist ennui, and the emotional labor that keeps appearances intact. Tone ranges from wry satire to bleak empathy, often using intimate detail and slow-burn plots to expose how economic precarity, social comparison, and cultural expectations erode identity and connection. Narratives may turn inward to psychological crisis or outward to small rebellions and moral compromises, offering both social critique and humane portraits of people trying to make meaning within constraining everyday lives.

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