Being Mortal, Then More Anne Tyler

My next selection for my Men's Book Club is Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014). This is a sobering read, especially for someone without children to look after him in old age. Dr. Gawande goes into great detail about what we have to look forward to as we grow old and infirm and are left more and more to the not so tender mercies of the medical establishment. It's not all bad news. There are some potential bright spots, but as he mentions repeatedly, there is no cure for old age, and sooner or later we all wear out. The issue is: how are we going to cope with the inevitable? Well, I'm hoping for the best and trying not to concentrate too much on the worst, while being somewhat mindful that some rough beast is coming down the road headed in my direction.

Meanwhile, I've returned to my Anne Tyler obsession. I'm working my way through most of the later novels, those I picked up at my local Half-Priced Books. I started this bunch with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), the one just before Accidental Tourist (1985) and Breathing Lessons (1986), which I'd already read. Then I read Saint Maybe (1991), which came after those two, and Ladder of Years (1995). All three of these are set primarily in Baltimore, although Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has a variety of other locales, and Ladder of Years spends significant time on the Eastern Shore. In any case, I was definitely back in Anne Tyler country with three very different families seeming to come apart at the seams. Everyone knows Tolstoy's observation at the beginning of Anna Karenina: that all happy families are alike and unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. With Anne Tyler it's more like: every family is dysfunctional in its own way. It isn't so much that these families are unhappy, although some of them seem to feel that they are. Nor am I even sure it's fair to say that all of her families are actually dysfunctional, although that is the impression I generally have. Perhaps it's just that we've all been taught to aspire to a certain ideal of family that is simply unattainable. And that unattainable ideal seems to be what drives the stories in these and in most Anne Tyler novels.

In the first, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the Tull family seems unable to recover from the desertion of the husband and father, Beck Tull, who one day leaves home never to return. And yet he remains a presence even in his absence that his wife Pearl and son Cody, the oldest of his three children, have difficulty shaking off. Tyler tells this story from the perspectives of the abandoned wife and children, shifting from one to the other as time passes and the the children grow older and start families of their own; all except Ezra, who remains behind to care for his aging mother. It is Ezra, in fact, who entertains the fantasy throughout the novel of having everyone sit down to a meal at his Homesick Restaurant, as though this would somehow restore them and make them whole again, a fantasy that almost comes to pass in the novel's final pages, although not quite in the manner Ezra had imagined.

Saint Maybe, on the other hand, begins by describing the Bedloes, an almost idyllic middle class family who seem to have achieved genuine happiness. Mom and Dad are a sound core of love and devotion to their three children, Claudia, Danny, and the much younger son Ian. But everything changes suddenly after Danny dies in a car crash that may have been a drunken accident or, as Ian suspects, an impetuous suicide in reaction to something Ian revealed about the behavior of Lucy, Danny's wife. When Lucy dies of an overdose soon after, unable to cope with widowhood and caring for her three small children, Ian, wracked with guilt, drops out of college to help his parents with the orphaned kids. But an even more dramatic turn comes one evening when Ian stumbles onto the Reverend Emmett and his storefront Church of the Second Chance. Having found a rather unorthodox version of religion, Ian refashions his life and becomes a substitute father and a master carpenter whose goodness and single-minded attention to penance and redemption becomes the driving force for the novel's story. This is an unusual Anne Tyler theme, but one she handles with her own deft awareness of the nuances of guilt, faith, love, and the wisdom that comes from Ian's determination to be true to himself as well as to his brother and Lucy, both of whom he comes to recognize he has wronged, and the children who have become his responsibility and his family.

I tend to feel that my favorite Anne Tyler novel is the one I've just read, and perhaps when I've finished reading all of them, I'll be able to sort this out more systematically, but much as I have enjoyed all of the ones I've read so far, I really found myself drawn into the world of Ladder of Years. And that seems all the more remarkable, because in some respects I realized all the while I was reading it that this one is much more fantastic than any of the others I've read. It's the story of Delia Grinstead, the youngest daughter of a Roland Park physician and wife of Dr. Sam Grinstead, the man who has taken over his practice. Vaguely dissatisfied with the way her life has turned out as dutiful wife and mother of two sons and a daughter, she walks away from a family beach vacation in Delaware and starts a new life in Bay Borough a tiny nondescript town on Maryland's Eastern Shore. There she assumes the identity of Miss Grinstead, who is quite different from the woman she had become living in Baltimore.

In some ways, Ladder of Years reveals the elements of wish fulfillment that appear to lie just beneath the surface of many of Anne Tyler's stories. She seems to be asking herself, what would happen if someone were to react in a certain way to some particular circumstance in life: the death of a spouse, or a sibling, a divorce, a runaway husband or wife, the loss of a job, and always the pressures of coping with difficult and uncooperative family members, children, spouses, or parents. Frequently, her central characters imagine what it would be like to take a different path, as Maggie Moran does in Breathing Lessons, or Rebecca Davitch in Back When We Were Grownups, or Liam Pennywell in Noah's Compass. But Delia takes the fateful step of actually walking away and starting over from scratch, as she puts it. She creates a new persona for herself, and eventually appears to be on the verge of taking on a new family as well. But as so often happens in Anne Tyler's stories, something draws her back to the life and family she left behind, and she eventually confronts herself in all her complexity and confusion over her own identity and relationships. But this time I found myself feeling that the novel, which may seem to return to where it started, although with some changes in perspective and perhaps also some self-knowledge gained by some of the main characters, does not come to a comfortable conclusion. There is much left unresolved. Delia must make choices, and her choices will have consequences both for herself and for all of the others her life has become entangled with. When the novel comes to an end, with another of Anne Tyler's almost comforting insights about family and the passage of time and the growth of understanding, we are left wondering what will happen next, and it's a rather unsettling feeling.