Taken from Contemporary Authors Online
Anne Tyler
1941-
Entry updated: 02/21/2008
Nationality: American
Birth Place: Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Genre(s): Children's literature; Novels; Novels of incident; Short stories
Awards
Career
Further Readings About the Author
Media Adaptations
Personal Information
Sidelights
Source Citation
Writings by the Author
Personal Information: Born October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, MN; daughter of Lloyd
Parry (a chemist) and Phyllis Tyler; married Taghi Modarressi (a psychiatrist and writer),
May 3, 1963 (died, 1997); children: Tezh, Mitra. Education: Duke University, B.A.,
1961; graduate study at Columbia University, 1961-62. Religion: Quaker (Society of
Friends). Memberships: PEN, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,
Authors Guild, Phi Beta Kappa, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Addresses:
Home: Baltimore, MD. Agent: Russell and Volkening, Inc., 50 W. 29th St., New York,
NY 10001.
Career: Writer. Duke University Library, Durham, NC, Russian bibliographer, 1962-63;
McGill University Law Library, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, assistant to librarian, 1964-
65.
Awards: Mademoiselle award for writing, 1966; Award for Literature, American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1977; National Book Critics Circle fiction
award nomination, 1980, Janet Heidinger Kafka prize, 1981, and American Book Award
nomination in paperback fiction, 1982, all for Morgan's Passing; National Book Critics
Circle fiction award nomination, 1982, American Book Award nomination in fiction,
PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and Pulitzer Prize nomination for fiction, all 1983, all
for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; National Book Critics Circle fiction award and
Pulitzer Prize nomination for fiction, both 1985, both for The Accidental Tourist; Pulitzer
Prize, 1989, for Breathing Lessons.
WRITINGS:
NOVELS
If Morning Ever Comes (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1964,
reprinted, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2004.
The Tin Can Tree (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1965, reprinted,
Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.
A Slipping-Down Life, Knopf (New York, NY), 1970, reprinted, Ballantine Books
(New York, NY), 2004.
The Clock Winder, Knopf (New York, NY), 1972, reprinted, Fawcett Columbine
(New York, NY), 1996.
Celestial Navigation, Knopf (New York, NY), 1974.
Searching for Caleb (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1976.
Earthly Possessions, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977, reprinted, Fawcett
Columbine (New York, NY), 1996.
Morgan's Passing (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1980, reprinted,
Fawcett Columbine (New York, NY), 1996.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY),
1982, reprinted, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2005.
The Accidental Tourist (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1985, reprinted,
ImPress (New York, NY) 1999.
Breathing Lessons (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1988.
Anne Tyler: Four Complete Novels (contains Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,
Morgan's Passing, The Tin Can Tree, and If Morning Ever Comes ), Avenel
Books (New York, NY), 1990.
Anne Tyler: A New Collection (omnibus volume; contains The Accidental Tourist,
Breathing Lessons, and Searching for Caleb), Wings Books (New York, NY),
1991.
Saint Maybe (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.
Ladder of Years (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1995.
A Patchwork Planet (also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1998.
A Patchwork Planet, Ladder of Years, Saint Maybe: Three Complete Novels,
Bright Sky Press (Albany, TX), 2001.
Back When We Were Grownups, Knopf (New York, NY), 2001.
The Amateur Marriage, Knopf (New York, NY), 2004.
The Accidental Tourist; & Ladder of Years: Two Novels, Ballantine Books (New
York, NY), 2005.
Digging to America, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.
EDITOR
(Editor, with Shannon Ravenel, and author of introduction) Best American Short
Stories 1983, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1983.
(Editor, with Shannon Ravenel) Best of the South: From Ten Years of "New
Stories from the South," Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.
(Editor, with Shannon Ravenel)Best of the South: From the Second Decade of
New Stories from the South, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC),
2005.
OTHER
Tumble Tower (juvenile), illustrated by daughter, Mitra Modarressi, Orchard
Books (New York, NY), 1993.
(With Robert W. Lenski) Breathing Lessons (screenplay; based on her novel),
Republic Pictures, 1994.
Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (juvenile), illustrated by Mitra Modarressi, G.P.
Putnam's Sons (New York, NY), 2005.
Contributor of short stories, poetry, and articles to periodicals, including Saturday
Evening Post, New Yorker, Seventeen, Critic, Antioch Review, and Southern Review.
Media Adaptations: A film adaptation of The Accidental Tourist, starring Kathleen
Turner and William Hurt, was released by Warner Brothers, 1988; it was also recorded as
a book on tape by Recorded Books, 1991. Back When We Were Grownups was adapted
as a film for a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation on CBS, 2004.
"Sidelights"
Despite her status as a best-selling novelist, Anne Tyler remains a private person who
rarely lets public demands interfere with her family life. She shuns most interviews,
avoids talk show appearances, and prefers her home in Baltimore, Maryland, to New
York City. As the author explained in an e-mail correspondence with Alden Mudge for
BookPage online: "I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime
I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward." In a body of
work that spans over four decades, Tyler has earned what former Detroit News reporter
Bruce Cook called "a solid literary reputation ... that is based solely on the quality of her
books."
Tyler's work has always been critically well received, but reviews of her early novels
were generally relegated to the back pages of book review sections. Not until the
publication of Celestial Navigation, which captured the attention of novelist Gail
Godwin, and Searching for Caleb, which John Updike recommended to his readers, did
she gain widespread acclaim. "Now," said Cook, "her books are reviewed in the front of
the literary journals and that means she is somebody to reckon with. No longer one of
America's best unknown writers, she is now recognized as one of America's best writers.
Period."
Born in Minnesota, Tyler lived in various Quaker communes throughout the Midwest and
North Carolina. She attended high school in Raleigh and at age sixteen entered Duke
University where she fell under the influence of Reynolds Price, then a promising young
novelist who had attended her high school. It was Price who encouraged the young
Russian major to pursue her writing, and she did--but it remained a secondary pursuit
until 1967, the year she and her husband settled in Baltimore. The longer she stayed in
Baltimore, the more prominently Baltimore figured in her books, lending them an
ambience both citified and southern, and leading Price to proclaim her "the nearest thing
we have to an urban Southern novelist." Writing in the New Yorker, Updike compared
her to Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty: "Anne Tyler, in her
gifts both of dreaming and of realizing, evokes comparison with these writers, and in her
tone and subject matter seems deliberately to seek association with the Southern
ambiance that, in less cosmopolitan times, they naturally and inevitably breathed. Even
their aura of regional isolation is imitated by Miss Tyler as she holds fast, in her
imagination and in her person, to a Baltimore with only Southern exits; her characters
when they flee, never flee north."
Other reviewers, such as Katha Pollitt, have found Tyler's novels more difficult to
classify. "They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place," Pollitt wrote in the
New York Times Book Review, "but [they] lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that
often characterizes self-consciously Southern literature. They are modern in their
fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with the contemporary moment as a subject,
so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in the
twenties or thirties. The current school of feminist-influenced novels seems to have
passed her by completely: her women are strong, often stronger than the men in their
lives, but solidly grounded in traditional roles."
The key to Tyler's writing may well lie in the homage she pays to Eudora Welty, her
favorite writer and one to whom she has been repeatedly compared. "Reading her taught
me there were stories to be written about the mundane life around me," Tyler told Cook.
Or as she phrased it to Marguerite Michaels in the New York Times Book Review:
"Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are
often really larger than the large things." Thomas M. Disch is one of several critics who
believes that Tyler's insight into the lives of ordinary people is her special gift. Writing in
the Washington Post Book World, he called it an "uncommon accomplishment that she
can make such characters interesting and amusing without violating their limitations."
Despite their resemblances to people we meet in real life, Tyler's characters are totally
fictitious. "None of the people I write about are people I know," she told Michaels. "That
would be no fun. And it would be very boring to write about me. Even if I led an exciting
life, why live it again on paper? I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that
one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances."
Tyler's major theme, according to Mary Ellen Brooks in the Dictionary of Literary
Biography, "is the obstinate endurance of the human spirit, reflected in every character's
acceptance or rejection of his fate and in how that attitude affects his day-to-day life. She
uses the family unit as a vehicle for portraying 'how people manage to endure together--
how they grate against each other, adjust, intrude and protect themselves from intrusions,
give up, and start all over again in the morning.'" Frequently her characters respond to
stress by running away, but their flight, Brooks explained, "proves to be only a temporary
and ineffectual means of dealing with reality."
Because the action of her novels is so often circular--ending exactly where it begins--
Tyler's fiction has been criticized for lack of development. This was especially true of her
early novels where the narratives are straightforward and the pacing slow. In fact, what
impressed reviewers most about Tyler's first book, If Morning Ever Comes, was not the
story itself but the promise it seemed to hold for future works of fiction. "The trouble
with this competently put-together book is that the hero is hardly better defined at the end
than he is at the beginning," observed Julian Gloag in the Saturday Review. "Writing
about a dull and totally humorless character, Miss Tyler has inevitably produced a totally
humorless and mainly dull novel. Anne Tyler is only twenty-two, and in the light of this
her refusal to take risks is a bit puzzling. I'd like to see what she could do if she stopped
narrowing her own eyes and let herself go. It might be very good."
For her part, Tyler reportedly came to dislike her first book as well as her second, which
received similar criticism. The Tin Can Tree was written largely to pass the time while
she was looking for a job. As Millicent Bell wrote in the New York Times Book Review:
"Life, this young writer seems to be saying, achieves its once-and-for-all shape and then
the camera clicks. This view, which brings her characters back on the last page to where
they started, does not make for that sense of development which is the true novel's motive
force. Because of it, I think, her book remains a sketch, a description, a snapshot. But as
such, it still has a certain dry clarity. And the hand that has clicked its shutter has selected
a moment of truth."
Perhaps the most salient feature of Tyler's next novel, A Slipping-Down Life--which was
misclassified as young adult literature and thus not widely reviewed--is its genesis. In
discussing her craft with Michaels, Tyler explained: "Sometimes a book will start with a
picture that pops into my mind and I ask myself questions about it and if I put all the
answers together, I've got a novel. A real picture would be the old newspaper clipping
about the Texas girl who slashed 'Elvis' in her forehead." In the novel, this incident is
transformed into an episode in the life of Evie Decker, a fictional teenager grappling for
her identity. "I believe this is the best thing I've ever done," Evie says of her self-
mutilation. "Something out of character. Definite." In the Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Brooks described the novel as "an accurate description of loneliness, failure
to communicate, and regrets over decisions that are irreversible--problems with which
any age group can identify. Tyler, who described A Slipping-Down Life as one of her
most bizarre works, believes that the novel 'is flawed, but represents, for me, a certain
brave stepping forth.'"
So, too, does Tyler's fifth novel, Celestial Navigation, a book that the author wrote while
"fighting the urge to remain in retreat even though the children had started school." Told
from the viewpoints of six different characters, Celestial Navigation is far more intricate
than Tyler's earlier novels, and most critics considered it a breakthrough. In her New York
Times Book Review article, Godwin explained how "Tyler is especially gifted at the art of
freeing her characters and then keeping track of them as they move in their unique and
often solitary orbits. Her fiction is filled with displaced persons who persist stubbornly in
their own destinies. They are [oddballs,] visionaries, lonely souls, but she has a way of
transcribing their peculiarities with such loving wholeness that when we examine them
we keep finding more and more pieces of ourselves."
In Morgan's Passing Tyler turns from an exploration of the "oddball" as introvert to the
"oddball" as extrovert in the creation of Morgan Gower, a forty-two-year-old hardware
store manager with a knack for assuming other roles. Simply put, Morgan is an imposter,
a man who changes identities every time he changes clothes. Though Morgan's Passing
was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award and an American Book Award,
critics were sharply divided in their assessment of the work. Those who liked it praised
Tyler's handling of the characters and her artful mingling of comedy and seriousness.
"Though she allows her tale to veer toward farce, Tyler always checks it in time with the
tug of an emotion, a twitch of regret," wrote Time 's Paul Gray, concluding that Morgan's
Passing "is not another novel about a mid-life crisis, it is a buoyant story about a struggle
unto death." Tyler acknowledged in a Detroit News interview with Cook that her "big
worry in doing the book was that people would be morally offended by [Morgan]."
However, critic Marilyn Murray Willison sang her questionable protagonist's praises. "In
spite of his inability to restore order to his life, his nicotine-stained hands and teeth, his
silly wardrobe, his refusal to accept reality, Morgan emerges from Tyler's book a true
hero," Willison wrote in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
Several critics, however, found Morgan to be problematic and considered Morgan's
Passing a disappointment. "For all its many felicities of observation and incident,
Morgan's Passing does not come up to the high standard of Anne Tyler's other recent
work. There is a self-indulgence in the portraiture of Morgan himself, whose numerous
identity assumptions became for me merely tiresome," Paul Binding wrote in the New
Statesman. And New York Review of Books contributing critic James Wolcott dismissed
Morgan's Passing as "a book of small compass, pent-up energy ... there's no suspense, no
surprise. Instead, the book is stuffed with accounts of weddings, crowded dinners, cute
squabbles, and symbolic-as-all-get-out puppet shows. Sentence by sentence, the book is
engaging, but there's nothing beneath the jokes and tussles to propel the reader through
these cluttered lives. It's a book with an idle motor." Writing in the New Yorker, Updike
explained his disappointment: "Tyler continues to look close, and to fabricate, out of the
cardboard and Magic Markers available to the festive imagination, images of the illusory
lives we lead. More than that it would be unkind to ask, did we not imagine, for the scope
of the gift displayed, that something of that gift is still being withheld."
With Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, her ninth and, some say, finest novel, Tyler
redeemed herself in many critics' eyes. Updike, for instance, maintained that this book
achieves "a new level of power and gives us a lucid and delightful yet complex and
sombre improvisation on her favorite theme, family life." Writing in the Chicago Tribune
Book World, Larry McMurtry echoed these sentiments, writing that Tyler "recognizes
and conveys beautifully the alternations of tragedy and farce in family life, and never
more beautifully than in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant." Benjamin DeMott was
even more impressed. "Funny, heart-hammering, wise, [the novel] edges deep into truth
that's simultaneously (and interdependently) psychological, moral and formal--deeper
than many living novelists of serious reputation have penetrated, deeper than Miss Tyler
herself has gone before. It is a border crossing," DeMott wrote in the New York Times
Book Review. McMurtry believed that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant "amply
demonstrates the tenacity of familial involvement," while Los Angeles Times reporter
Carolyn See maintained that Tyler shows how a family "is alive with needs of its own; it
never relaxes its hold. Even when you are far away (especially when you're far away), it
immobilizes you in its grip, which can--in another way--be looked at as a caress."
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant unfolds in a series of self-contained chapters, each, in
Updike's words, "rounded like a short story," and each reflecting a different family
member's point of view. This narrative technique, as Sarah English noted, "allows [Tyler]
to juxtapose past and present and thus to convey the vision--that she has always had--of
the past not as a continuum but as layers of still, vivid memories. The wealth of points of
view also allows Tyler to show more fully than ever the essential subjectivity of the past.
... Every character's vision of the past is different." This portrait of family entanglements
was too somber for some critics' tastes, however, including Cynthia Propper Seton's.
"What may be the trouble with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, " she wrote in the
Washington Post Book World, "is that the ... family is not marginal enough, its members
are too grave a proposition for a mind so full of mischief as Anne Tyler's. They depressed
her." In her Detroit News review, however, Cynthia King maintained that "despite the
joyless atmosphere, the author's humor bubbles through." DeMott concluded: "What one
wants to do on finishing such a work as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is maintain
balance, keep things intact for a stretch, stay under the spell as long as possible. The
before and after are immaterial; nothing counts except the knowledge, solid and serene,
that's all at once breathing in the room. We're speaking obviously, about an extremely
beautiful book."
The Accidental Tourist, Tyler's tenth novel, again combines the author's subtle,
understated probing into human nature and her eye for comic detail. The title serves both
as a reference to the protagonist's occupation and as a metaphor for his life. Macon Leary
writes travel guides for people who dislike traveling and who would prefer to stay in the
comfort and familiarity of their own homes. The guide books--the series is titled The
Accidental Tourist--advise reluctant travelers on how to visit foreign places without
experiencing the annoyances and jarring peculiarities that each new city offers. Thus,
Macon counsels his readers on where they can find American-style hamburgers in
Amsterdam, for instance, or on the type of reading material to carry on the plane so as to
ward off chatty passengers. As with her previous novels, reviewers praised the gently
ironic humor and sympathetic, likable characters that Tyler created in The Accidental
Tourist. Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noted that the
character of Macon Leary "is an oddity of the first water, and yet we grow so close to him
that there is not the slightest warp in the lucid, touching and very funny story of an
inhibited man moving out into life." Other critics observed that Tyler fuses the mix of
tragedy and comedy that appears in most of her previous books. McMurtry, writing in the
New York Times Book Review about "the mingling of misery and contentment in the daily
lives of her families" that Tyler constructs, commented that "these themes, some of which
she has been sifting for more than twenty years, cohere with high definition in the muted
... personality of Macon Leary." Some reviewers criticized Tyler for her tendency to draw
sympathetic characters and to infuse humor into so many of her scenes. Chicago Tribune
Book World critic John Blades wondered whether "Tyler, with her sedative resolutions to
life's most grievous and perplexing problems, can be taken seriously as a writer." Most
reviewers, though, praised the book and its author. Eder noted, "I don't know if there is a
better American writer going."
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, Tyler examines the
themes of marriage, love, and regret. The story concerns Maggie and Ira Moran, married
for twenty-eight years, and a journey they make to the funeral of an old friend. During the
trip they both reflect on their years together--some happy, some sad. Maggie is
gregarious and curious, while Ira is practical and withdrawn. Both at times regret their
decision to marry, but they also recognize the strength of the bond between them. Critics
again remarked on Tyler's ability to evoke sympathy for her characters and her talent for
constructing humorous scenes. Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review,
generally summed up critical reaction by noting that "there are moments when the
struggle among Maggie, Ira, and the melancholy of time passing forms a fiery triangle
more powerful and moving ... than anything she has done."
"Tyler's twelfth novel, Saint Maybe," wrote Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor
Caren J. Town, "addresses most directly another important Tyler concern: religion." The
protagonist of Saint Maybe is Ian Bedloe, a well-adjusted teenager. Ian's family life
changes drastically when his older brother, Danny, marries a divorcee named Lucy, who
has two children of her own. Danny commits suicide after the birth of his daughter,
Daphne, and Lucy dies of an overdose of sleeping pills soon after. Ian is overcome with
guilt; he seeks guidance from a fundamentalist sect known as the Church of the Second
Chance, led by the charismatic Brother Emmett. Emmett charges Ian to care for his
brother's children as a penance for his connection with Danny's death. "Tyler has a well-
known skepticism about the premise of most religions," declared Town: "'It's not that I
have anything against ministers,' she ... [said] in a discussion about Earthly Possessions,
'but that I'm particularly concerned with how much right anyone has to change someone,
and ministers are people who feel they have that right.'" As Brad Leithauser remarked in
the New York Review of Books,"Saint Maybe winds up being something of a curious
creation: a secular tale of holy redemption."
Tyler uses her characters in Saint Maybe to examine the role of modern American family
life. "Is the family an anchor in the storm?" asked Marilyn Gardner of the Christian
Science Monitor. "Or is it a shackle? Do duty and devotion hold together the members
who make up a family as well as the family itself? Or do families become, not support
systems, but burdens of guilt, leading to damaging sacrifices of personal freedom?" New
York Times Book Review contributor Jay Parini wrote of the novel: "In many ways it is
Anne Tyler's most sophisticated work, a realistic chronicle that celebrates family life
without erasing the pain and boredom that families almost necessarily inflict upon their
members."
Tyler moves in a different direction with Tumble Tower--which features illustrations by
her daughter, Mitra Modarressi--and creates "a kid-pleasing story about Princess Molly
the Messy and her royal family of neatnicks," according to Christian Science Monitor
contributor Karen Williams. Unlike her obsessed parents and siblings, including Prince
Thomas the Tidy, Molly lives a comfortably unkempt life. "The moral of Tyler's tale,"
declared Suzanne Curley in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "is that a princess
unfazed by half-eaten candy bars left under her chair cushions, kittens nesting among
fluffy slippers on the closet floor or a bed 'all lumpy and knobby with half-finished books'
probably has her priorities straight, and may have much to teach about the way clutter
often goes hand-in-hand with coziness."
In Ladder of Years, stated New York Times Book Review contributor Cathleen Schine,
"the story that appears to unfold of its own accord is a fairy tale of sorts, a fairy tale with
echoes of both the tragedy of King Lear and the absurdity of the modern romance novel."
Suzanne L. MacLachlan explained in the Christian Science Monitor that the novel "is
written from the viewpoint of a woman approaching middle age who feels she is losing
her family." One day Delia Grinstead simply walks out on her obnoxious husband and
her uncaring teenaged children and starts a new life in a Maryland town some miles
away. She becomes self-supporting, taking a job as a lawyer's secretary. "Just as she
subverts the domestic with fantasy--her situations are earthbound until you notice that
they are gliding along two inches above the earth--she subverts fantasy with the
domestic," explained a Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor. Delia's old patterns
of behavior begin to reassert themselves and she returns home for her oldest daughter's
wedding. "Her eventual journey back to her home and family are, in many ways,"
MacLachlan stated, "the universal search for self. She finds, in the end, that the people
she has left behind have traveled further than she." Declared New York Times reviewer
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his review of Ladder of Years: "As always, Ms. Tyler
writes with a clarity that makes the commonplace seem fresh and the pathetic touching."
The hero of A Patchwork Planet is a likeable ne'er-do-well. As a teenager, Barnaby
Gaitlin disappointed his rich Baltimore parents by breaking into other people's houses,
not so much as a thief but to go through family mementos and pry into others' lives.
Unlike most of Tyler's fiction, A Patchwork Planet is written in the first person; Barnaby
tells his own story. "One of Tyler's major strengths," observed Jonelle Bonta in
Metroactive Books, "has always been her uncanny ability to depict children, describing
their simplistic reactions to life's complex situations with unsentimental understanding. In
A Patchwork Planet, a similar rich talent is revealed: an empathy with the elderly." Linda
Simon, reviewing the novel for the World and I, commented that by the end of A
Patchwork Planet "nothing changes in Barnaby except his own self-perception. And yet,
Tyler shows us, this change in perception may allow us to see the world as a bit less
haphazard and incoherent, and to celebrate our place, however modest, on our own
makeshift patch of the planet." Gill Hornby, writing for the Literary Review online, noted
that "Barnaby's life is so engrossing, there is such a clatter of subplots--family squabbles,
car purchases, domestic wrangles--that it is only when you get to the last, perfect cadence
that you realize how carefully, minutely plotted a novel this is ... probably Tyler's finest
novel yet."
Reviewing Back When We Were Grownups, a Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as
"packed with life in all its humdrum complexity--and funny, so funny, the kind that
compels reading aloud." As Beth Kephart noted in Book, "in her deeply moving and
perfectly syncopated new novel ... Tyler presents a stunning portrait of fifty-three-year-
old Rebecca Davitch, a 'wide and soft and dimpled' woman whose style of dress edges
'dangerously close to Bag Lady,' whose hair naturally assumes a 'pup tent' shape and
whose compulsive goodness has become the source ... of much eloquent soul-searching."
L. Gregory Jones, reviewing for the Christian Century, found similarities between
Rebecca and the character of Delia Grinstead in Ladder of Years. According to Jones, the
two women "present contrasting ways of trying to escape their present lives. One woman
concludes that she has been an impostor in her own life, and so needs to assume a
different character; the other wants to assume a different character by becoming an
impostor." Rebecca's life is revealed to the reader in flashbacks as she reminisces and
reflects on what has brought her to this point. Despite a brief and tentative dalliance with
the college sweetheart to whom she was once engaged, Rebecca comes to realize while
watching old family movies that she has enjoyed her life immensely and ended up right
where she belongs. In a review critical of Back When We Were Grownups, Michiko
Kakutani noted in the New York Times that Tyler's "fiction has always hovered perilously
close to the line between heartfelt emotion and cloying sentimentality," and went on to
conclude: "In showing how family traits are passed down generation to generation, in
showing how shared rituals, celebrations and crises create a communal history, she
[Tyler] demonstrates the talents that galvanized so many of her earlier books and that
help redeem this very flawed novel." Linnea Lannon, writing in People, expressed an
opinion more in accordance with that of other reviewers: "A wonderful life makes for a
wonderful novel."
In his BookPage review, Mudge wrote: "What Tyler herself has always been particularly
good at is depicting the fullness of life lived on a human scale. Her characters are not--
and do not aspire to become--members of the glitterati or the literati.... Their dramas are
the commonplace dramas of family and community life. Tyler's great art has been to
illuminate her characters' lives with wry wit and insight, not to exalt them to some larger,
brighter stage." Such talents are fully realized in The Amateur Marriage, which Mudge
believed, "quite simply, ... ranks among Tyler's best to date." The Amateur Marriage is
the story of Michael Anton and Pauline Barclay, whose accidental meeting in Baltimore
just after the attack on Pearl Harbor that pulled the United States into World War II
culminates in a hasty--and ultimately unhappy--marriage. Tyler traces their lives as they
raise their family, into old age, and through the 9/ 11 terrorist attack on the United States.
As Tyler told Mudge, The Amateur Marriage "grew out of the reflection that of all the
opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the
richest. I didn't want a good-person-bad-person marriage, but a marriage in which solely
the two styles of character provide the friction."
Reviewing The Amateur Marriage for Bookreporter.com, Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum
called it one of Tyler's best works. "The old cliché that 'time heals all wounds' lurks
beneath the surface of The Amateur Marriage, but Tyler doesn't really dig down to it in
any obvious ways. Rather, as in real life, her fictional world continues to turn, and one at
a time each character moves on with his/her wounds, bound at some time to heal. As in
all of her works, Tyler has woven truisms and object lessons that will make readers nod
knowingly.... Human nature is what fascinates Anne Tyler and she plays with it as if it
were modeling clay. In her hands she fashions people, places, events, atmospheres, pain
and joy with a smooth narrative style that is punctuated with life lessons for anyone who
chooses to see them. Fans of Tyler will not be disappointed in The Amateur Marriage,
and those new to her work will be motivated to explore her other novels. Her many
talents continue to blossom with age, and her touch remains as gentle as it is firm."
Digging to America touches on several themes found in Tyler's other novels. "Its sweep,
however, is broader than that of many of her previous books and focuses on identity,
belonging and what it is to be American," wrote a reviewer for the Economist. The novel
centers around two middle-class couples, with little in common, who meet by chance at
the Baltimore airport when their adopted Korean daughters arrive on the same flight from
Asia. Jin-Ho goes to Bitsy and Brad Donaldson, an older couple who seem to personify
stereotypical American suburbanites, while the other infant, Sooki, goes to a much
younger Iranian-American couple, Sami and Ziba Yazdan. Not long after the couples'
first meeting, Bitsy invites the Yazdans to an "arrival party," which later becomes an
annual tradition, and which Tyler uses as a tool to "mark the passage of an intense, if
sometimes difficult, friendship," according to a reviewer for the Economist. When Bitsy's
recently widowed father, Dave, falls in love with Sami's mother, Maryam, it is an act
considered by a Publishers Weekly critic as the "narrative and emotional heart of the
touching, humorous story." Now Maryam must redefine for herself what it means to be
part of a culture and a country.
Digging to America marks the first of Tyler's novels to feature foreign-born characters.
(Her husband, now deceased, was born in Iran.) Tyler "proves as adept at getting into
Iranian heads as American ones.... She deftly depicts the multilayered world of Iranian
immigrants, where relationships hinge on, among other things, when one came to
America and what one did in the old country. The trip through the various cultural
accoutrements and thought processes is an engaging one," remarked Susie Currie in a
review of the book for the Weekly Standard. Library Journal critic Starr E. Smith praised
the novel as "a touching, well-crafted tale of friendship, families, and what it means to be
an American."
When asked by an interviewer for USINFO where she got the idea for Digging to
America, Tyler responded: "The book's original inspiration was a memory from real life:
a chance glimpse of a family of strangers meeting their adopted baby for the first time at
the Baltimore airport. It was only later, when I was actually outlining the plot, that I
realized the book was also about the immigrant experience."
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Carol Shields stated that Tyler "has always
been a warmly compassionate recorder of middle-class America, yet one who is wide
open to the riffs, the reverberations, the trajectories of the dislocated." According to Alice
McDermott, writing in the Washington Post: "Surprise is not the point in an Anne Tyler
novel, nor is plot, or even connectedness. The charm of an Anne Tyler novel lies in the
clarity of her prose and the wisdom of her observations, in her fine ear for the 'clamor' of
family. While the world of each of her novels resembles nothing so much as the world of
all her other novels, her stories remain stubbornly like life."