Anne Tyler: 'Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about'
Rencontre avec la romancière américaine culte.
Connue pour son habileté à dépeindre des personnages marquants, la célèbre auteure sort cette année son 23e roman « Redhead by the Side of the Road », en français « Un garçon sur le pas de la porte ». L’occasion de plonger dans la psychologie d’une figure majeure de la littérature américaine.
She is one of the world’s most acclaimed modern novelists, winner of both a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle award and a finalist for the Man Booker and the Women’s prize for fiction. But until 2012, she maintained a silence as assiduous as that of Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger. She never liked – and still doesn’t – talking about how she does what she does, because that leads to self-consciousness, which is never good for creativity. So she was “kind of relieved” when the tour was cancelled because of the coronavirus outbreak. “But I remember I used to pray the school would burn down before a math test the next day. Yet if it had actually burned down I would have felt so guilty. So now I’m thinking, ‘Oh dear, be careful what you wish for!’” she says. 2. For the past half-century, Tyler has been the pre-eminent novelist of normal life. She is famously good at summing up a character in a precise line (“She had not grown fuller or softer with age. She was like certain supermarket vegetables that turn from green to withered without ever ripening” – from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 1982), but twice she tells me she is “no good at plot, as I’m sure you’ve noticed”.
3. It’s true that no one would mistake a Tyler novel for a John Grisham, but no one can match her evocation of the moments that build up a life: the awkward family meals, the day your spouse suddenly seems like a stranger, trying to make sense of how you have become the adult you are today, the conflicted gestures we make at trying to be good. “Time passing is a plot. You can’t not have something happen if the years go by,” she says.
No one can match her evocation of the moments that build up a life.
CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
4. As a child, Tyler’s favourite book was the American classic The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, about a house watching a city sprout up around it. Her fans – who have ranged from John Updike to Jacqueline Wilson to Nick Hornby – will recognise her memory of hoping the school would burn down as classic Tyler: her novels are studded with adult characters evoking childhood sensations, pleating time, revealing the truth of the adult through the child they were. “I’m more in touch with my emotions and the visceral
sensory from childhood than any other part of life. I don’t know if it helps with creativity, but I do know that when I talk to other writers they talk about their childhood in great detail,” Tyler says.
5. Her new novel, Redhead by the Side of the Road, her 23rd, features many of the usual Tyler tropes. Its protagonist, Micah, is a man, as so many of Tyler’s greatest characters are, which is partly why she has so many male fans. Tyler grew up with three brothers and was happily married for 34 years to Taghi Mohammad Modarressi, an Iranian psychiatrist, until his death in 1997. “I am very comfortable writing as a man, and I think that’s because I had really good men in my life. They made me feel comfortable and I thought, ‘OK, they’re not so different from me,’” she says. 6. Like many of Tyler’s male characters, Micah has let his life drift past him after a youthful regret and tries to counter the loss of control over his life by adhering to self-coined rules about when he cleans the kitchen, how he makes the bed, how he drives.
7. Like all of Tyler’s characters, Micah lives in Baltimore, as Tyler herself has done for more than 50 years. She has said that she’s a writer so she can live out different lives, but it seems that whatever life she imagines, she always wants to live in Baltimore. “Yes, that’s probably true. It’s a city with character, but it is also laziness on my part – by setting the book here I don’t have to do much research,” she says with easy self-deprecation. 8. I cannot let that pass: her books are full of meticulous research. She meticulously writes her books out in longhand multiple times, and then reads them into a recorder and listens back to make sure the dialogue suits each character and there are no clangers. The idea that Tyler defaults to anything in her books out of laziness is nonsense – she just loves her city.
CURRENT EVENTS
9. Unlike her other novels, Redhead by the Side of the Road features multiple references to current events. “I was writing the book already by the time Trump was in office and all that was going on. So I consciously felt it would be immoral to pretend life was just la la la. I don’t want to be one of those people who ties their novel to current events so it’s practically out of a newspaper, but at the same time I felt I should mention that it is an unhappy time,” she says.
10. Her books often end optimistically, showing human kindness. But is she having trouble maintaining that optimism about humanity in the current political climate? She hesitates for a second. “Not up close, if you know what I mean. Up close you’ll always see things to be optimistic about.”
11. Tyler grew up in Quaker communities around the south and midwest, the eldest of four children. She did not attend mainstream school until she was 11, and a common theme in her books is a character looking at the “normal” world and trying to understand how it works.
12. “One of the first things that happened when I joined the school was that I was surrounded by these girls and they were asking me all these questions. One said, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m only 11.’ And she said, ‘I know, do you have a boyfriend?’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m in another world here.’ It was very tough to figure out, and I remember it very clearly,” Tyler says. While at university, she started to write short stories, and then published her first novel, The Tin Can Tree, when she was 23. Aside from a fiveyear break to raise her daughters, she has written steadily ever since.
SENTIMENTAL?
13. “I know the world does not need another book from me, but I have nothing else to do with myself. I have no hobbies. So then I feel guilty when I say to my agent, ‘I seem to have another book ready if you want to take a look at it …’” she says. Her ideal day would involve several hours of “good involved writing, the kind when you suddenly look up and three hours have gone by”. While liking Tyler’s books is as uncontroversial as liking chocolate, there have been some criticisms over the years, some more fair than others. Those who dismiss her as sentimental (“our foremost NutraSweet novelist”, one American critic wrote) overlook the biting humour in her work.
HER OWN CRITIC
14. “Repetitive” is more merited, although the familiar plots are shells for her elegant writing and characterisation, which are never boring. Yet I’ve found some of her more recent novels less satisfying than her mid-career peak of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons. Tyler is her own best critic. She recently reread The Accidental Tourist for the first time in many years. “And one of the things I thought was, ‘I think I was a better writer when I was younger.’ I was more detailed, I took more time. It’s not as if I’m in a rush now, but I trust the reader more.”
15. She is already working on her next book, “and once again, it’s about a family and set in Baltimore”, she says in a tone of pure self-mockery. Then with the grace that comes from a lifetime of self-knowledge, sinking in little by little, she adds, “And I love all that.”
1. novelist romancier / award prix / to lead, led, led to engendrer / self-consciousness gêne / kind of plutôt, assez / relieved soulagé / tour tournée / to cancel annuler / outbreak (début d') épidémie / yet pourtant / actually réellement, vraiment / guilty coupable / to be careful faire attention / to wish for souhaiter.
2. pre-eminent par excellence / to sum up résumer; ici, définir / character personnage / full complet, dans toute sa force (ici, elle n'a pas grandi en plénitude…) / withered flétri / to ripen mûrir / Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (VF) Le Déjeuner de de la nostalgie / plot intrigue, histoire / to notice remarquer, constater.
3. to mistake prendre pour, confondre avec / to match égaler / awkward gênant, embarrassant / spouse conjoint(e) / to make, made, made sense of comprendre / conflicted ambivalent / gesture geste. 4. to sprout up surgir de terre, se construire / to range (from... to) aller (de... à) / to be studded with être parsemé/rempli de / to pleat plisser; ici, recouper deux époques / to be in touch with être connecté à /
great ici, beaucoup de. 5. to feature présenter / trope ici, thème récurrent / comfortable à l’aise.
6. to drift partir à la dérive / past devant; ici, sous ses yeux / youthful de jeunesse / to counter compenser / to coin inventer (ici, ...qu'il s'est lui-même fixées...) / rule règle.
7. whatever quel(le) que soit / laziness paresse / to set, set, set ici, situer l'action de / research (inv.) recherche(s) / self-deprecation autodérision.
8. longhand à la main / recorder dictaphone / to suit convenir (à) / clanger bourde (incohérence) / to default to ici, avoir recours à, utiliser / out of par.
9. unlike contrairement à / current actuel / in office au pouvoir / to go, went, gone on se passer / to tie associer.
10. kindness bonté / to have trouble (+ ger.) avoir du mal à.
11. Quaker mouvement religieux protestant fondé par G. Fox (la "Société des Amis") / midwest région du nord des É.-U. allant de l'Ohio aux montagnes Rocheuses / eldest aîné / to attend fréquenter (établissement), suivre des cours / mainstream conventionnel.
12. to surround entourer / tough difficile / to figure out comprendre / short story nouvelle / aside (mis) à part / break pause / to raise élever / steadily de manière constante.
13. to involve impliquer, consister en / involved ici, concentré / to go, went, gone by passer, s'écouler / to dismiss (as) ici, considérer (connotation péjorative) / foremost éminent / Nutrasweet société américaine qui commercialise de l'aspartame; ici, il y est fait réf. pour critiquer le côté mielleux des romans d'Anne Tyler / to overlook sous-estimer / biting mordant, caustique, cinglant.
14. shell coquille / boring ennuyeux / The Accidental Tourist (VF) Le Voyageur malgré lui / Breathing Lessons (VF) Leçons de conduite / own propre (à soi) (ici, ...sa meilleure critique) / to be in a rush être pressé.
15. self-mockery autodérision / lifetime vie entière / self-knowledge connaissance de soi / to sink, sank, sunk in assimiler.