Anne Tyler's Novels

Several weeks ago when I was looking for something different to read I picked up a copy of Anne Tyler's novel Noah's Compass (2010), one of her more recent works which we had acquired somewhere along the line. I hadn't read any of her books since reading The Accidental Tourist (1985) not too long after it was first published. Like many others I had been very taken with her ability to capture the qualities of everyday life with memorable characters and situations that were humorous and also somehow familiar. Noah's Compass attracted me in part because the central character was a recently retired school teacher who was both estranged from his family and yet still entangled in their lives. Anne Tyler is quite deft at describing the world through the eyes of either male or female characters. And despite her apparently self imposed limitations -- setting nearly all of her recent novels in Baltimore and concentrating almost entirely on family relationships -- she manages to achieve an interesting range of narrative effects. I have to say that I enjoy reading Anne Tyler's novels primarily for the entertainment. Her humor is exactly the sort that appeals to me, arising as it does from the characters and situations, accompanied by her gentle irony and sympathetic understanding of human shortcomings. She reminds me a bit of another of my favorite authors, Barbara Pym, whose wit is very similar to Anne Tyler's, but sometimes with a slightly sharper, more British edge. Also, Anne Tyler's men seem more believable, but that may be saying something about the limitations of Barbara Pym's material more than her storytelling.

When I finished Noah's Compass, I found that I was a bit sad to have reached the conclusion. I missed the story and the characters. So I picked up a copy of Breathing Lessons (1988), which was the novel that followed The Accidental Tourist, and that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There is no denying that Breathing Lessons deserves all the attention it received. It is a more ambitious work than some of her others, weaving together the stories of another dysfunctional Baltimore family in alternating sections and chapters that shift the point of view, primarily between Maggie and Ira Moran, now middle aged and somewhat surprised and disappointed by how things seem to have turned out. I was impressed by the way Tyler structured the novel around a day-long road trip to Pennsylvania to attend a funeral for the husband of Maggie's closest childhood friend. With the use of dreams and flashbacks, however, Tyler manages to tell us the life stories of all her central characters, and how they have reached this particular moment of family crisis. While Ira appears more resigned to the current state of affairs, Maggie seems determined to intervene (as she frequently has) both directly and indirectly, especially in the lives of her son and daughter-in-law, to bring about the happy ending she is so certain everyone desires. As always seems to happen in Anne Tyler's fiction, her characters reveal the extent to which they are trapped inside their own personalities, which seem to have been fully formed almost from birth. The miraculous thing, however, is the way her characters also reveal their capacity for love, even when their hearts' desires are frustrated by their own nature or ingrained habits of living.

By now my appetite was whetted, and I was reluctant to leave Tyler's world behind, so I turned to the last of her novels we had on hand, Back When We Were Grownups (2001). This one turned out to be my favorite so far. Although there's a tone of melancholy more palpable than in some of her other novels, and a more or less constant attraction to alternative lives and roads not taken, the total effect is rather uplifting. After reading several of Anne Tyler's works, I was struck by her tendency to emphasize both the frequent human desire for things to be other than they are at the moment, either a return to some pleasant memory of times past, or a hopeful longing for a different future. But along with this quest for change there is often the much more powerful tug of the comfortably familiar, the routine, the habitual, and the mundane. Perhaps this appeals to me because it seems so true to my own experience of life. In any case, the drama in Anne Tyler's narratives is usually enacted within the constraints of rather uneventful occurrences of daily living. Life's major events -- deaths, births, weddings, funerals -- frequently happen off stage, before the actions depicted in the plot, if Tyler's novels can be said to have plots, since they seem to follow the random incidents of daily existence so faithfully that it's difficult to detect the narrator's guiding hand. In Back When We Were Grownups, we follow Rebecca Davitch's attempts to discover the person she should have been, after realizing that her life's journey has taken her somewhere quite different from where she thought she would be going, and given her a role and responsibilities she finds somewhat at odds with her own notions of who she was meant to be. As frequently happens in Anne Tyler's stories, Rebecca eventually comes to terms with her life, although not perhaps in the way she intended or thought she wanted, but with a far deeper and richer understanding of herself and her sometimes disagreeable and exasperating family.

Having determined that Anne Tyler is one of the best writers I've read, and one of my favorites, I decided to reach back and read her first published novel, If Morning Ever Comes (1964). When this one came out, she was just 22, and I wondered if I could detect some of the qualities I liked so well in her later works. Certainly, there were some obvious differences. If Morning Ever Comes is quite obviously a southern novel, set mostly in North Carolina, and as Tyler herself acknowledges, there are some traces of influences from Eudora Welty and her former teacher at Duke University, Reynolds Price. Interestingly, the main character is male, a young man who has gone away to study law at Columbia University, but feels suddenly drawn back home to Sandhill, North Carolina, by a potential family crisis. His oldest sister, Joanne, has left her husband and suddenly returned home with her baby daughter. We discover that Ben Joe, in addition to being saddled with a ludicrous double barreled name, has grown up in a typically dysfunctional southern setting with six sisters and a mother whose husband, the beloved small-town doctor, has abandoned his family to shack up with a local girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Suffering an identify crisis that seems to come to a head during this spur of the moment visit back home, Ben Joe sorts through his feelings for his father (who died six years earlier of a heart attack shortly after returning to his wife and family) and his extended household of sisters, and mother and paternal grandmother. Adding to his confusion of feelings, memories, and longings for the past, is the unexpected return of his alternately adored and neglected childhood sweetheart, Shelley.

There certainly are many elements of later Anne Tyler novels even in this very early one: the claustrophobic attention of a close but annoying extended family, a central character who seems conflicted by his longing to return to some more or less fondly remembered past and his desire to get away from the clutches of his suffocating relations, and a story that is more a string of encounters between Ben Joe and the other characters than an actual plot. But there is also at least one significant difference. The ending of If Morning Ever Comes brings the novel to a kind of resolution that seems somewhat out of character, or less true to the natures of the novel's characters as we've come to know them. What I find so appealing in Anne Tyler's later fiction is the way we see what's coming almost before her characters do. We somehow know that generally despite what they think they want for themselves, they will very likely end up with something else, something different, but more in keeping with who they are and what they need or require to continue with their life. And often there's a bonus besides, when the central character recognizes that life is as it is for a reason. It reminds me of that refrain from an old Rolling Stones song: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. Wisdom enough to take away from any song or story.

Well, now that I've ventured this far, I suspect I'll keep going for a while longer. I just went to the Half-Priced Book Store and bought another half dozen Anne Tyler novels. I'm curious to see if my impressions hold up to a more extensive exploration of her works. In any case, I'm looking forward to more time with Anne Tyler's fiction. Perhaps I'll report back when I've done some more reading.