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Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler's Novels
I didn’t really appreciate the novels of Anne Tyler until I was old enough to have developed real curiosity about the ordinary lives of other people. In my earlier years, I preferred books that were more fraught (John Updike) or that were more sardonic (Kingsley Amis). I am sorry to say that I was quite dismissive of most contemporary female novelists---though in my defense I have to say that it was because the ones I’d happened to encounter just weren’t very good. I hadn’t yet discovered Margaret Atwood or A.S. Byatt, I didn’t fully appreciate Ursula LeGuin, and Amy Tan and Donna Tartt hadn’t yet come along (just to name a few of the female novelists whose work has become part of my consciousness over the years. Nowadays I can take Updike in only minimal doses, though I still like Amis).
I read The Accidental Tourist because they’d made a film based on it and I recognized the title when I went into the bookstore. It struck me at the time because the characters were such odd people. They weren’t like any other fictional characters I could think of. I was still pretty young when I read it, so I didn’t realize that the reason that they seemed odd is because---in contrast to most works of fiction--- they really were like real people. Real people are usually quirky, full of contradictions, and quite vague about what they want out of life if you get to know them well enough to get past their pretences and defenses.
Tyler’s characters struggle with life. In one sense, their struggles are trivial---her people aren’t the CEO’s of corporations, university presidents, politicians, judges, or in positions of power. Except for the genuine eccentrics, they live very ordinary lives. The ones who are successful are often successful in very odd occupations---Tyler is ingenious at inventing the sort of businesses that don’t exist where I live, but I wish they did (e.g., the Clutter Counselor in Saint Maybe, Rent-A-Back in A Patchwork Planet, the very special travel writer in The Accidental Touristi, the very special ‘handyman’ in The Clockwinder, the very special restaurant in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and so on. Often the very successful people are the fringe characters; the leading ones tend to be teetering on the edge of financial success, but you don’t necessarily see them arrive there.
Her books are comforting exactly because her characters do struggle and they are the same struggles that everyone has. They find love and lose it or they lose it and then find it. People die; children are born. The characters’ reactions to both events, and to everything else, are richly mixed. They often don’t feel the way they think they should feel or behave the way they intended. In every book, not just the main characters but the peripheral characters as well grow and change. They affect one another.
Though all the books end on a note of hope or happiness, it’s always a fragile and hard-won happiness that the reader realizes could collapse at any moment. Her stories are filled with transformations and epiphanies, but the changes don’t always push the characters in the direction that you expect.
Each book is a slice of ordinary life and each has a completely different flavor from the others. They span the last twenty years or so, but it doesn’t matter---they could be happening today or tomorrow. I can’t say what my favorites are because I like all of them. Which I feel most like rereading (and they are books I’ve read and reread) depends on what I need from Tyler.
They are very comforting books, and are often very funny, but they are also full of insight---often very strange, skewed, unexpected insights: life seen from the perspective of
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an unworldly and agoraphobic artist who falls in love with his lodger (Celestial Navigation)
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the agnostic wife of a fundamentalist preacher, taken hostage by an insecure bank robber and forced to accompany him on a road trip (Earthly Possessions)
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an overweight and rather dull teen-ager who falls in love with the local aspiring rock star and town bad boy (A Slipping-Down Life)
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a middle-aged man who deals with his angst by adopting various fictive personalities (Morgan’s Passing)
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a handsome young scion of a wealthy philanthropic family with a history of petty theft and a job doing manual labor for the elderly (A Patchwork Planet)
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another charming young man who, after accidentally bringing about his older brother’s suicide, finds God through ‘The Church of the Second Chance’ and greatly annoys his family thereby (Saint Maybe
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an unappreciated and restless wife who leaves her family without notice and starts an entirely new life in a small town (Ladder of Years)
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a widow who decides at the age of 50 that she ended up in the wrong life, and tries to recreate a past romance (Back When We Were Grown-Ups)
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the loving and tender-hearted middle son of an embittered, embattled family whose sole desire in life is to own a restaurant where he can bring them all together (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
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a family coping (not necessarily very well) with the death of a difficult (and somewhat ignored) six year old girl (The Tin Can Tree)
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a happily married middle-aged couple whose stability is threatened by the wife’s craving to connect with her divorced son’s daughter (Breathing Lessons)
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a miserably married middle-aged couple who can’t get along or get out of the marriage until one day…one of them does (The Amateur Marriage)
As I said, each book is entirely different from every other book, but all are full of compassion and humor. The characters---even the baddies---are all in their ways desperate, afflicted, and hopeful. (They are also perhaps unrealistically gentle). But if I had to identify a theme it would be a theme of transformation. The ordinary people in an Anne Tyler novels often find extraordinary ways to cope with the pain that life hands out to everyone.
For this reason, though Tyler never appears to take sides with her characters and never preaches, the books deepen the reader’s experience of the world and even provide the reader with resources for coping with pain and loss that reader not have realized he or she possessed. They force you to see the unique beauty in ordinary people and things.
If you are feeling alienated, bereft, jaded, or just fed up, and you haven’t read anything by Tyler, I highly recommend her to you.
RELATED POSTINGS
“A Modicum of Blood, Carefully Husbanded”: Famous Ghost Stories---How to Find the Good Ones
Comfort Food for the Psyche: Why I Love Anne Tyler’s Novels.
Updike for the 21st Century [book review; fiction]
Second-Hand Bookstore Gold: The Short Stories of H.H. Munro. [book review]
Lynda Barry Rocks My World: The Greatest of Marlys, One Hundred Demons, and Cruddy. [book review; graphic novel; fiction]
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum---It’s Always About the Templars
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