THE UNDERRATED WORK OF ANNE TYLER
Author’s technically perfect novels set the standard
Redhead by the Side of the Road
Anne Tyler
Bond Street Books
Anne Tyler may, in the end, prove to be one of the most influential novelists of her generation. While critics were busy lauding authors with much more obviously weighty and portentous topics, Tyler’s technically flawless novels of domestic relationships, mostly in Baltimore, were drawing the attention of writers.
The best American writers now, from Elizabeth Strout to Michael Cunningham, give the impression of having learned much more from Tyler than from John Updike. The old accusation of suburban cosiness, of what used to be called a middlebrow quality, no longer convinces, now that many of her books have demonstrated real, lasting worth.
They are optimistic books, and are evidently the work of someone who genuinely likes and is interested in human beings. But they don’t minimize suffering, or automatically reward likability. They know all about the cost of maintaining likability, and some of her most memorable inventions, like Rebecca in Back When We Were Grownups, are studies in keeping the show on the road. There is real horror present. The Accidental Tourist takes place in the wake of the senseless murder of a child, and the dog the child left behind has teeth that draw blood. Saint Maybe, perhaps the most moving of all her books, is about a lifelong act of atonement for a single sentence that, once spoken, kills two people and leaves three small children abandoned — the plot has some of the gravity of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.
Many of her favourite subjects are, quite frankly, difficult people. Pearl, the matriarch in her first great book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is abandoned by her husband, and Tyler doesn’t hesitate; there is a lot about Pearl that no one could stick. Quite a lot of her novels take place over a very long time span, and we often watch these characters grow up, or grow old; we get used to them; we start to see them understand what they’ve done; we are on their side. I thought I would never get behind the family in Digging to America that tries to recreate Korean culture in Baltimore for the benefit of their adoptive baby; Tyler’s patient exploration turned what starts with the whiff of satire into warm, humane life.
Her books are so irresistibly readable that it’s startling to realize what technical marvels they often are. The first chapter of A Patchwork Planet is extraordinarily compelling; but all that happens is that one stranger asks another to carry out a very minor task. The task is done without any effort. Nothing goes wrong. The virtuosity is in portraying it through the eyes of a man in whose hands it certainly would have gone wrong. Our interest, and our sympathy, is all with the observer. Probably her most showy technical feat is also her most enchantingly relaxed performance; Breathing Lessons, which takes place on a single day, as a long-married pair go to a funeral, visit an estranged daughter-in-law, bicker and make up. Nothing much is altered by anything that happens in the story; after a few pages, almost nothing would stop you reading.
Redhead by the Side of the Road is Tyler’s 23rd novel, and unmistakably a “late work.” It shows some signs of paring down that reminded me of the last couple of novels of Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Blaming. Like Taylor, Tyler has often been a novelist who loves a book crowded with characters — it takes some time to sort out the family in the tumultuous Back When We Were Grownups. Here, the structure is much simpler, and really depends only on four characters.
Micah Mortimer is one of Tyler’s unambitious but indispensable cogs in society; he has a business servicing the computers of the neighbourhood. He knows most people think his passion for order is excessive. (“Some might leave (the dishes) to air-dry, but Micah hated the cluttered appearance of dishes sitting out in a draining rack.”) He may not pick up social clues very reliably. (“Am I the very dumbest old biddy among all your clients?” Mrs. Prescott asked him. “No, not at all,” he told her truthfully. “You’re not even in the top 10.”)
When his woman friend (“he refused to call anyone in her late 30s ‘a girlfriend’”) appears to be on the verge of eviction, he listens carefully, and offers rational advice. “You’ll find another place, trust me.” The relationship is over, to Micah’s surprise.
Micah’s orderly life gets another push when an unknown teenage boy turns up, the son of a woman Micah had dated years ago; what the boy Brink has come to think about Micah shapes the story, and when his mother turns up, gives us a glimpse of the unspoken and strangely comfortable tensions within family relationships.
Brink’s travails are comic; he is in trouble at university for plagiarizing an essay.
Micah’s clients form a charming chorus; his huge family provides a chapter to be cherished, as sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews all pile in. But it’s a concise and trimmed-down novel at the root.
What is so moving about
Tyler’s work is that, always, we have the illusion that we’re hearing what her people feel like saying, and no more than that.
“‘Well, I call that pretty discouraging,’ Micah said. ‘What’s the point of living if you don’t try to do things better?’ Ada shrugged and handed a child a plate of dessert. ‘You got me there,’ she said.”